JERUSALEM, September 15, 2016 (WAFA) – Israeli police on Thursday forced a Palestinian person from Jerusalem to leave his house, under the pretext that three generations have passed since the house was rented.
Mazen Qerresh, owner of the house, told WAFA that Israeli policemen broke into his house on Thursday early morning, and handed him an order issued by an Israeli court asking him to leave his house. The order claimed that Qerresh had to evacuate his house, claiming that three generations have passed since the house was rented.
Qerresh said he and his family have lived in the house for 58 years, adding that eviction order forces him and his eight-member family to live outside the Old Quarter in Jerusalem.
To be noted, Israeli authorities have taken over dozens of homes apartments in Jerusalem during the past few years.
The Absentees’ Property Law (1950) is one of Israel’s major legal instruments for seizing Palestinian property,” according to Stop The Wall campaign, a local organization monitoring Israeli violations of Palestinian rights.
“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 e-state left behind by the Palestinians who were forcibly displaced 1948. It is still in effect and used to confiscate Palestinian properties more than six decades later,” the campaign reports.
On February 9, a Jewish settler group attempted to evict a house rented by a Palestinian family in the neighborhood of Aqabat al-Khalidiya in Jerusalem’s Old City, citing that the house belongs to a Jewish family and that settlers have the right to inhabit it instead of a Palestinian family.
The house’s owner, Ahmad Sub Laban, said his family rented the house in 1956 from Jordan’s then Custodian of Enemy Property (CEP), 11 years before Israel occupied the eastern part of Jerusalem. The house was originally owned by Jewish migrants before the CEP assumed control of Jewish-owned property upon the Israeli-Arab war in 1948.
Settlement activities and Israeli settlers in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem are illegal under international law.
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