JERUSALEM, Sunday, February 17, 2019 (WAFA) – Israeli police evicted a Palestinian family on Sunday from their home in the Old City quarter of occupied East Jerusalem after an Israeli court had ruled that the home was built on a land that belongs to Jewish settlers.

The police forcibly evicted Hatem Abu Assab and his family from their home while beating him up in front of his family, witnesses told WAFA.

The Abu Assab family have been living in the stone-made house for the past 65 years. But Israel’s Supreme Court ruled they did not own the plot of land upon which the home was built and thus ordered their eviction.

The court ruled that the home belonged to Jewish groups under the “Absentee Property Law”, although the lawyer of the Abu Assab family had obtained a court ruling to postpone the eviction to the end of this month.

There is an estimated settler population of around 200,000 Jews living in East Jerusalem, alongside about 250,000 original Palestinians.

Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital and says Jews have a right to live anywhere in the city and to reclaim property lost there in the 1948 war, when Jordan took over the West Bank.

M.N