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Israel evicted Palestinians from their homes in AlQods/JerusalemE
58 Palestinians forced out of their homes, which had been immediately setteled by jewish families...
August 03, 2009
by Marian Houk
In the early morning hours Sunday, Israeli Border Police broke into the homes of the Hanoun and Ghawi families in Sheikh Jarrah, north of the Old City but still part of downtown East Jerusalem, and forcibly expelled at gunpoint three families from one building (only one of them was under court expulsion order) and four from another (there, only one was under court expulsion order). Over 50 Palestinian refugees (from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war) immediately became homeless, with nowhere to go. No provisions were made to care for their household possessions or to shelter them by the Israeli authorities who have administered the area since their conquest in the June 1967 war, and who had ordered the expulsions to be carried out. Sunday night, the Hanoun and Ghawi families were out on the streets. "The Red Cross came and offered us tents", said Maher Hanoun, "But we do not want any tent. We do not want rations of rice and sugar. We want to return to our home". Just after the eviction operation, settlers moved in, protected by the Israeli Border Police. They were religious-nationalist Jewish settlers who are probably but not necessarily Israeli (they could, for example, be American citizens, or of some other nationality, and not necessarily even immigrants) immediately moved into both homes. The settlers were busy setting up house behind Israeli police barricades inside the confiscated Palestinian homes. From inside the Hanoun house, where only a few weeks ago a banner with the image of U.S. President Barack Obama and an adaptation of his winning presidential campaign slogan, "Yes, you can", had been strung up on the front of the building next to the banner printed by the neighborhood committee, reading "Stop Ethnic Cleansing in East Jerusalem" the sound of electric drilling and hammering could clearly be heard for a couple of hundred meters on Sunday night. After rejecting a series of appeals in a complicated legal case, in which Jewish settler organizations claimed properties that they said had been purchased by Jews since around 1985, under the Ottoman Empire which ruled the whole region for over 400 years, but which then fell under Jordanian administration as a result of the division of Jerusalem in the war that surrounded the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The Jordanian administration had allocated the land to UNRWA, the UN Agency set up to help Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, so that homes could be built for Palestinian refugees from that war. In recent years, a Palestinian individual, Suleiman Darwish Hijazi had claimed that the land was really his. The Israeli Supreme Court had not supported his claim, and earlier this year had also rejected documents from Turkish Authorities in charge of the Ottoman archives stating that there was no Jewish claim to those specific properties on record in the Ottoman archives -- and the Court set a deadline of 19 July for the two families to leave their homes.
Read more here : http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/112735
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 09:34 on August 4th, 2009
NEEDS WORK, but this needs to be told!