On Thursday, the Israeli District Court in occupied Jerusalem rejected the appeal of four Palestinian Jerusalemite families against eviction rulings in the Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood in Silwan, south of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in the occupied Palestinian capital, Jerusalem, in the West Bank.
The Wadi Hilweh Information Center In Silwan (Silwanic) and the Batn Al-Hawa Neighborhood Committee issued a joint statement confirming the rejection of the appeal submitted on behalf of the families of Salem Abdul-Ghani Gheith, Jawad Abu Naab, Abdul-Fattah Al-Rajabi, and Nasser Awad Al-Rajabi.
The court’s sessions, held over the past two days, resulted in decisions to evict the Palestinian families to allow illegal Israeli colonialist settlers to move into the properties and alleged that the lands were owned by Yemeni Jews dozens of years ago.
The Palestinian families have 90 days to file appeals with the Israeli High Court against the ruling, however, such appeals are routinely denied by the Israeli judicial system that represents the country that illegally occupies East Jerusalem and promotes colonialist activities there.
The families live in nine residential units, housing more than 80 Palestinians, including many children, women, elders, and several residents with special needs.
The Ateret Cohanim Association claims that 5 dunams and 200 square meters of land in the Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood have belonged to Jews from Yemen since 1881, and since 2015 the association has begun delivering orders and judicial notices to families in the Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood to evict them from their homes.
Zoheir Al-Rajabi, head of the Batn Al-Hawa Neighborhood Committee, explained that 87 families, comprising between 600-680 people, are also threatened with eviction in the Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood, and are facing judicial decisions and notifications from the Israeli Magistrate, Central, and Supreme courts.
It is worth mentioning that the Israeli Supreme Court rejected an appeal filed by the Shehada family to evict them from their home in the neighborhood early last June. Thirty-two Palestinians from the Shehada family live in three apartments.
Ateret Cohanim, also known as “Ateret Yerushalayim,” functions with enormous funding from within Israel, but especially from various foreign groups, especially in the United States.
The right-wing colonialist organization is a political group that advocates and effectively acts to ensure the expulsion of the Palestinians from occupied Jerusalem.
The group promotes and funds Israel’s illegal colonialist activities and aims at creating a Jewish majority in the Old City and in all Palestinian neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem.
All of Israel’s colonies in the occupied West Bank, including those in and around occupied East Jerusalem, are illegal under International Law, the Fourth Geneva Convention in addition to various United Nations and Security Council resolutions. They also constitute war crimes under International Law.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” It also prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory”.
