The police cordoned off the road leading to the disputed houses, stopping journalists from reaching them. Orthodox Jews were allowed through to visit a nearby site believed by Jews to be the ancient tomb of Shimon Hatzadik, or Simeon the Just, a Jewish high priest.

Nasser Ghawi, one of the evicted Palestinians, said his family had been living in its house for 53 years. Maher Hanoun, the head of the other evicted family, was out on the street like Mr. Ghawi.

“I do not need a tent or rice,” Mr. Hanoun said. “What I need is to return to my house, where I and my children were born.”

Thirty-eight members of the Ghawi family were removed from six apartments that made up one of the houses. There are 17 people in the Hanoun family.

The houses were built in the 1950s by a United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees when the area was under Jordanian control. Jordan gave the families ownership of the houses but had not formally registered the buildings in their names by the time the 1967 war broke out, according to the families’ lawyer, Hosni Abu Hussein.

In the early 1970s, a Jewish association claimed ownership of the land around the tomb, based on property deeds from Ottoman times. At first the Palestinian families agreed to pay rent to the association to continue living there as protected tenants. Mr. Abu Hussein said they stopped paying when he learned that the Jewish deeds had been forged.

Eviction orders were issued, though the authenticity of the property deeds is still debated in Israeli courts.