RAMALLAH, Tuesday, March 16, 2021 (WAFA) - Fourteen Palestinian and regional organizations sent a joint urgent appeal to United Nations special procedures on forced evictions in east Jerusalem
The appeal addressed six UN Special Rapporteurs, including the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.
The organizations highlighted forced evictions as part of Israel’s coercive environment in East Jerusalem, through which it maintains its institutionalized regime of racial domination and oppression over the Palestinian people.
The appeal highlights how 15 Jerusalemite families totalling 37 households of around 195 Palestinians, residing in Karm Al-Ja’ouni area in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood in Silwan, are currently at imminent risk of forced eviction. Unlawfully applying Israeli domestic law to occupied territory, Israeli courts have ruled in favor of lawsuits undertaken by settler organizations to evict the 15 Palestinian families.
Acknowledging that most of the families living in Karm Al-Ja’ouni area and Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood are refugees, the joint appeal outlines how Israel has ensured the maintenance of its apartheid regime over the Palestinian people through its policies and practices, such as the strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people, including by denying Palestinian refugees and other persons displaced their inalienable right to return, and the appropriation of their homes, lands and property, coupled with the creation of a coercive environment designed to drive the ongoing transfer of Palestinians particularly in East Jerusalem.
The appeal urged the mandate holders to recognize and to declare that the laws and policies Israel have created, and continue to maintain, as an institutionalized regime of racial domination and oppression over the Palestinian people as a whole, which amounts to the crime of apartheid.
The organizations called on the international community to cooperate to bring to an end, including through coercive measures such as sanctions, Israel’s occupation, colonization, and apartheid regime, as well as the prolonged denial of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, and the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes, lands, and property, as mandated by international law.
T.R.
