Palestinian family evicted from home of 50 years
Israeli police evicted a Palestinian family from the east Jerusalem home in which they had lived for over half a century, making way for Israelis deemed the legal occupants.
The Shamasneh family has for years been fighting a court battle against Jewish claimants who said that the building was their family property, which they fled when east Jerusalem was occupied by Jordanian troops in the 1948 war that led to the creation of the Jewish state.
Under Israeli law, if Jews can prove their families lived in east Jerusalem homes before the 1948 war, they can demand that Israel’s general custodian office release the property and return their “ownership rights”. During the war, thousands of Jews fled Jerusalem as Jordanianled Arab forces seized the city, while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled from land that was later to become Israel.
No such law exists for Palestinians who lost their land.
Fahamiya Shamasneh, 75, said that police arrived before dawn ordering her, her sick husband Ayoub, 84, their son and his family out of the house in the upscale Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood where the couple had lived for 53 years.
It was the first eviction in the neighbourhood since 2009, according to Israeli anti-occupation group Peace Now, part of a fight over the disputed status of Jerusalem.