JERUSALEM, August 5, 2015 (WAFA) – Israeli police Wednesday asked two East Jerusalem Palestinian families to leave their homes, under the pretext of absentee ownership, according to WAFA correspondent.

Israeli police ordered Sabri Abu-Nab and Abdullah Abu-Nab, two Jerusalemite Palestinians, and their families to leave their homes before August 11, because the two properties are “absentee”.

Jewish settler organizations claim the two homes are located on the site of an abandoned Jewish synagogue.

Abdullah Abu-Nab described the order a “manipulation” by the Israeli judiciary which was biased toward the settlers.

He said settler groups had no proof of ownership of the two homes, which have been inhabited by the Abu-Nab family for hundreds of years, even before the establishment of Israel.

Zuhair Rajabi, a pro-Jerusalemites activist and advocate, said a number of lawyers and him were planning to gather as much legal documents as needed to prove the Abu-Nab family’s ownership of the two homes. He said the lawyers will travel to Turkey to obtain paperwork from the Ottoman era that proves the Abu-Nab’s ownership of the two homes.

For years, Israel instituted a series of mandatory laws, regulations and policies to legalize the confiscation of Palestinians’ lands and property and prevent them from returning to their homes.

Palestinians’ land was deemed “absentee property” based on the 1950 Absentee Property Law and the control of the land was transferred to the government and semi-governmental agencies, such as the Jewish National Fund and Israel’s Land Administration for the benefit of Jewish Israelis.

Under this law, Palestinian refugees and the internally displaced are regarded as “present absentees”, designations that authorized the confiscation of their land. The implication of this was that the majority of the Palestinian land was lost.

The law was first enacted and took effect in 1950 after the great population transfer that Israel experienced in its early days, as thousands of Palestinian Arabs were forced to flee the city of fear of being killed. The law was approved by the Supreme Court of Israel on April 16 2015.

Secretary General of the Islamic-Christian Committee to Support Occupied Jerusalem and Holy Sites, Hanna Issa, denounced the court’s decision, and said such property belongs to thousands of indigenous Arab and Palestinian residents who were forced out of their homeland, following the 1948 and 1967 wars.

Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign says that, “By classifying every citizen or persons present in an “enemy” territory or country as an “absentee” vis-à-vis property in Israel, the law has served to confiscate the land and real estate left behind by the Palestinians who were forcibly displaced 1948,”

In 1967, most Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) de facto became “absentees” with regard to their property in East Jerusalem, which was unilaterally and illegally annexed by Israel.

Israel’s annexation and extension of the Absentees’ Property Law to occupied East Jerusalem is in violation of international law and has been strongly condemned by the United Nations.

M.N/M.H