Israeli law blind to real titles
Court disallows appeal while forcing Palestinians in East jerusalem out of homes.
Nasouh Nazzal,
September 29, 2010
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With the freeze on colony construction having only just come to an end, already 28 Palestinian families from the Shaikh Jarrah Arab neighbourhood have been ordered by the court to evict their homes. Seven of these families are literally on the street even as there is the looming threat of more people being forced out of their homes. The Israeli colonists had fabricated documents that were subsequently approved by the Israeli Supreme Court, top Palestinian officials said on Tuesday. This has been confirmed by a number of heads of non-governmental organisations in occupied Jerusalem.
The colonists say they own a huge plot of land in the Shaikh Jarrah neighbourhood and stress that a rabbi has also been buried in the area. They furnished false documents in the court asserting their claim to the land. Zeyad Al Hamouri, who heads the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights, says the actual owner of the land is Darwish Hijazi, who produced documents from Turkey to back up his claim. However the court refused to recognise the titles, observing it was too late to file an appeal. Pleas that it had taken time for the documents to arrive from Turkey fell on deaf ears. Hijazi died during the litigation and it was left to his children to produce the actual land deeds.
The 28 evicted Palestinian families have been living in the area since 1948 in houses which they built themselves following an agreement between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government to address the plight of Jordanian refugees. The Jordanian government was supposed to register the land in the names of the families but for some reason it failed to do so and the matter has never been resolved. After the 1967 occupation of East Jerusalem, Israelis claimed the plot of land was the property of the custodian general and said the families living on it were simply tenants who should be evicted once their tenancy contracts expired. The evicted families are said to be shocked that the owner failed to produce the land records on time.
Already plans are afoot to raze the entire neighbourhood and build 250 new houses. Approval was obtained from the Jerusalem Municipality even before the supreme court verdict, Al Hamouri said.
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Under common law (the ancient and basic concept of not being a bastard) this is clearly the behaviour of arseholes.
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