Forced evictions in Jerusalem amount to war crime: Palestine

JERUSALEM (AA): Palestine has condemned the forced eviction of Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem by Israeli forces as a “war crime.”

Israeli judicial authorities ordered a Palestinian family to vacate their house in favor of Jewish settlers in a case dating back to 1978.

The Palestinian family has been involved in a legal dispute with the Israeli authorities and settlers for 45 years. Israeli settlers claim that Jews resided in the house before Israel’s creation in 1948, and Jordan later took over the administration of East Jerusalem.

They base their property claims on an Israeli law dating back to the 1970s that allows Jews to recover property that belonged to Jews before the establishment of Israel.

“The forced eviction of the [Palestinian] family…amounts to a war crime,” the Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs said in a statement.

It said the Israeli decision “is part of attempts by the occupation and settler groups to seize as many as Palestinian houses in Jerusalem’s Old City and Silwan town near the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

The decision “aims to evacuate the Palestinians as part of the racist apartheid system applied by the occupation,” it added.

The ministry called on the international community to urgently act “to stop all forced evictions, home demolitions, settler colonial activity, attempts to divide Al-Aqsa Mosque, and attacks on sanctities.”

Al-Aqsa is Islam’s third-holiest site, its first prayer direction and the place of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him)’s Ascension to the heavens. On the other hand, Jews insist that the area upon which the mosque is built is the Temple Mount — the site of two Jewish temples in ancient times.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, where Al-Aqsa is located, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It annexed the entire city in 1980 in a move never recognized by the international community.