JERUSALEM, Thursday, October 08, 2020 (WAFA) – Israeli occupation authorities today banned a Fatah official entry into the occupied West Bank for three months, according to said.

The authorities banned the secretary of Fatah movement in Jerusalem Yasser Darwish from entering the West Bank for three months.

Darwish was detained by Israeli Intelligence on a main road artery and transferred to al-Maskoubiya detention and interrogation facility earlier today.

He said that he was accused of attending an anti-normalization festival organized by Fatah in the Jerusalem-district town of Anata, noting that he was released on the condition of being banned from entering the West Bank for three months and severing contact with the Palestinian leadership.

Darwish was detained several times before and was banned from his home for days.

Israeli police cracks down on any Palestinian official activity in Jerusalem as part of Israel’s aim to eradicate any manifestation of Palestinian political presence and identity, and frequently detains officials and activists from the city, which it occupied along the rest of the West Bank in June 1967.

It ‘annexed’ East Jerusalem shortly later, claiming it part of its "indivisible capital," which has never been recognized by most of the international community as the Palestinians see East Jerusalem as the capital of their future independent state.

Rights groups have long pointed out that Israel’s discriminatory policies in East Jerusalem – which include routine home demolitions, discriminatory allocation of building permits, and the eviction of Palestinians from their homes for the benefit of Israeli settlers – are aimed at driving out Palestinians from the city.

With over 70 percent of Palestinian families in occupied East Jerusalem living below the poverty line, if life becomes too expensive, they have little choice but to move to congested Jerusalem neighborhoods on the other side of Israel’s apartheid wall or into the West Bank.

After Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, Palestinians were not given Israeli citizenship, but were instead issued permanent residency permits, which can be revoked by Israel for a variety of reasons, including  insufficient loyalty to the State of Israel.

K.T./ K.F.