OCCUPIED JERUSALEM —
Israeli occupation forces demolished a residential building in occupied East Jerusalem on Tuesday,
leaving 35 people, the majority of them children, homeless.
اضافة اعلان
“Municipality personnel came at 9am, broke the
doors, expelled us, and didn’t let us take any belongings,” said Faris Rajabi,
35, who lived in the building in the neighborhood in Silwan.
The Palestinian news agency, Wafa, stated that the
Rajabi family owned the building.
The demolition of the three-story building was
carried out because the owners allegedly lacked the required permits, according
to Israel.
Israel regularly razes Palestinian homes in occupied
East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Rajabi said his family had gone to great lengths and
paid over $100,000 in fines and fees in order to settle the issue in the
courts.
The catch, according to a
UN study, is that such
permits are “virtually impossible” to obtain, and the result is a chronic
housing shortage.
The building included five apartments and housed 35
members of the Rajabi family, Rajabi told AFP.
Silwan, adjacent to Jerusalem’s Old City, is the
site of a campaign by Jewish settler groups to expand Israeli presence there.
Palestinians have decried the influx of settlers,
stating that they seeking to push them out of their own neighborhood.
The demolition was “political, not legal,” said
Rajabi, adding that “they anyway don’t give us permits, and this is a policy of
dispossession and ethnic cleansing.”
The
Palestinian Red Cross said five Palestinians,
including a journalist, were beaten by police at the site of the demolition,
adding one was hospitalized.
Nearly 40 structures have been razed in East
Jerusalem this year, displacing about 100 people, according to the UN Office
for the Coordination of Human Affairs.
Some owners prefer to raze their homes themselves to
avoid being charged thousands of shekels for the demolition, by the city’s demolition
crews.
Israel occupied the
West Bank and East Jerusalem in the 1967
Arab-Israeli War. It later annexed East Jerusalem in a move never recognized by
most of the international community.
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