Mohammed Mar'i Saudi Gazette RAMALLAH – The Israeli High Court of Justice gave a Palestinian family eighteen months to evacuate their home in occupied Jerusalem after a legal battle, a Palestinian official said on Friday. Ahmed al-Rowaidhi, the chief of Al-Quds Unit at the Palestinian Presidency, said that the Israeli court rejected the family's petition to stay in the residence in the East Jerusalem's neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah until the elderly Shamasneh's, who say they have lived there since 1964, were deceased. He added the court ordered the family to find a new residence in the city within the 18 months. Al-Rowaidhi said that the Israel Land Fund claims it owns the 65 square meters home where the 10 members of the Shamasneh family reside. The Jerusalem District Court ordered the family to evict the home in 2012. The official said that the elderly family members until now had succeeded in delaying eviction despite groups of right-wing Jewish activists recent legal actions to evict or retake residences in the neighborhood. Al-Rowaidhi said that at least 28 families of Sheikh Jarrah face eviction from their homes. Israel evicted dozens of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah on in the past two years. Israeli police then cited a ruling by High Court of Justice that the houses belong to Jewish settlers and that the Palestinian families had been living there illegally. The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was built by the UN and Jordanian government in 1956 to house Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war. However, with the start of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, following the 1967 war, occupiers began claiming ownership of the land the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was built on. According to Al-Rowaidhi, Sheikh Jarrah is particularly vulnerable to illegal Israeli expansion because it connects Jewish West Jerusalem, the Old City and Israeli settlements to the north and east. “Israel is once again showing its utter failure to respect international law,” he said. The official added that the Israel violates the Fourth Geneva Convention which forbids it as an occupying power from altering the demographic composition of territories it has seized, either by expelling Palestinians or by settling Jews there. “New Jewish settlers from abroad are accommodating themselves and their belongings in the Palestinian houses and the evicted Palestinians will have nowhere to sleep” the Palestinian official said. He called on Palestinians to show more caution to the Israeli measures and called on the international community “to intervene and stop the racist policies and the ethnic cleansing in the holy city.” Israel captured East Jerusalem in the June 1967 War, annexed it in 1980, and has since built settlements there that are home to some 300,000 Jewish settlers. Control over the city has been seen as the most sensitive and thorniest issue of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinians hope to make East Jerusalem the capital of their future state but the Israel says the city is its eternal capital.
