The Israeli Peace Now movement said that approximately 500 words was all what the judges of the Jerusalem District Court needed to determine the fate of seven Palestinian families with 31 people, including eight children, in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem.
"The court ruled that the Palestinian families should vacate their homes by August 1st, 2021 in favor of Israeli settlers. Three weeks ago, the same court rejected another appeal by six other families against their eviction from their homes and in a few rows determined that they should leave their houses in favor of the settlers," added Peace Now.
Meanwhile, the movement underlined that "This way, in less than one month, the Jerusalem District Court ordered the eviction of 58 people, 17 of them children, from 13 houses in Sheikh Jarrah, despite the fact that all of them legally settled in their homes, in an official agreement with the Jordanian government which built the houses for them at the 1950s."
"The lawsuit is part of an organized move designed to dispossess a Palestinian community of its home and establish a settlement in Sheikh Jarrah in its place, said Peace Now. Hundreds of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah are in a similar situation in court proceedings, and hundreds more in Batan al-Hawa in Silwan."
Advocate Sami Arsheid, who represents the families, confirmed after the hearing of the appeal on Monday that the issue of the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan is one of the items of the complaint filed by the Palestinians to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The Prosecutor of the ICC, Fatou Bensouda, declared earlier last week the initiation of an investigation respecting the situation of Palestine.
"Since the beginning of 2020 to the present day, judgments have been given in 14 eviction claims of Israeli settlers against Palestinian families in the Batan al-Hawa in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah. In the rulings, the Israeli Magistrate’s Court ordered the evacuation of 33 families with 165 people, including dozens of children - seven cases in the Batan al-Hawa for the evacuation of 107 people from 20 families; seven cases in Sheikh Jarrah for the evacuation of 58 people from 13 families," it insisted.
"All the families have filed appeals and are in various stages of hearing in the district court, and some even in the Supreme Court. Dozens more families are in proceedings and may receive evictions soon. If the government does not stop the move, there might be massive evictions of families in the coming months," warned Peace Now.
"The story here is not legal but political. The court is only the tool by which settlers use with the close assistance of state authorities to commit the crime of displacing an entire community and replacing it with a settlement."
It added that "The Israeli government and settlers have no problem to displace thousands of Palestinians in the name of ‘the Right of Return’ to properties before 1948, while they strongly claim that the millions of Israelis living in Palestinian properties before 1948 cannot be evicted. Since the evacuation of the Mughrabi neighborhood for the purpose of expanding the Western Wall (Al-Buraq) plaza in 1967, there has been no such deportation in Jerusalem. On the table of the prosecution in the ICC in The Hague is a complaint about the displacement process led by the government in Sheikh Jarrah and in Batan al-Hawa. The government can still stop this injustice."
The eviction lawsuits against the families of Dajani (11 individuals), Dahudi (2 individuals) and Hammad (18 individuals) were filed by a company called "Nahalat Shimon", owned by a foreign company registered in Delaware (USA), which represents settlers seeking to build a large settlement in Sheikh Jarrah. The settlers purchased the land from two Jewish associations, the Sephardi Community Committee and the Knesset Israel Committee, which claimed to have purchased the land at the end of the 19th century.
In 1948 the land, which was then without structures, came under Jordanian rule. The Jordanians designated the land for the resettlement of dozens of Palestinian refugee families, who exchanged their refugee status for homes in the newly-built neighborhood in Sheikh Jarrah. After 1967, the Jewish organizations recovered the ownership rights of the land based on the Legal and Administrative Matters Law and began to demand that the refugee families vacate their homes. To that extent, the associations were exercising the "right of return" of Jews to assets taken in 1948, a right not afforded to Palestinians.
"In recent years, the Nahalat Shimon settler company has filed numerous lawsuits against dozens of families in Sheikh Jarrah in the Karem Ja’uni area, which are in various stages of court hearings. Recently, eviction procedures against the Sabbagh family were renewed after losing in court to the settlers in a similar lawsuit."
"The settlement of Karem Ja’uni began in 2008 when the Al Kurd family was evicted from its home, and in 2009 the Rawi, Hanoun and part of (another) al-Kurd families. Beforehand, in the late 1990’s, settlers entered a few houses near Karem Ja’uni that were owned by Jews before 1948. Apart from the Sabagh, Dajani, Dahudi and Hammad families, there are at least seven additional eviction cases dealing with dozens of families in various stages of court hearings in Karem Ja’uni. On the western side of the Sheikh Jarrah Neighborhood, in Um Haroun, there are another few dozens of families facing eviction lawsuits by settlers, and in Batan Al-Hawa in Silwan there are almost 100 families at risk of eviction."