Israeli occupation authorities have expelled French-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hammouri to France after holding him under administrative detention without charge or trial since March.
Hammouri “was deported this morning to France following Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked’s decision to withdraw his residency status,” the Israeli occupation Interior Ministry said in a statement on Sunday morning.
Hammouri, 37, was arrested on March 7 at his home in the Kufr Aqab neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem and since then has been in administrative detention.
In October 2021, Israeli occupation authorities revoked his East Jerusalem residency, denying him the right to live in his hometown, which ‘Israel’ captured in 1967 from Jordan.
In November, Israeli authorities said Hammouri would be forcibly deported to France because of his alleged “breach of allegiance to the State of Israel” and “based on secret evidence he cannot challenge.”
Hammouri is a human rights lawyer known for advocating for the rights of detainees, including torture survivors.
He is a researcher with the Palestinian prisoners’ rights NGO, Addameer. For his political activism, he has spent a total of eight years in Israeli prisons over different periods.
In 2005, ‘Israel’ sentenced him to seven years for an alleged Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) plot to assassinate Ovadia Yosef, a right-wing rabbi – an accusation he denied.
He was released in December 2011 as part of an exchange of Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Shalit.
Hammouri, who is married to a French national and has two children, has been unable to speak to his wife or see her since his arrest. In September, he staged a hunger strike to protest his conditions.
The #JusticeforSalah campaign said in September that Hammouri, who was held in the maximum security prison Hadarim, was moved into solitary confinement in a 2×2 square meter cell with no windows and a primitive toilet.
A statement from the Hammouri campaign called the deportation a “war crime” and said it constituted a breach of international law.
“Wherever a Palestinian goes, he takes with him these principles and the cause of his people: his homeland carried with him to wherever he ends up,” Hammouri said in a statement on the day of his forced deportation.
In October, UN independent experts condemned Israel’s measures against Hammouri as “sadistic”.
“We are concerned by Israel’s pervasive misuse of administrative and criminal law proceedings and use of secret information against Palestinians, including human rights defenders such as Mr. Hammouri,” they said.
“The detention practices Mr. Hammouri is being subjected to are not just unlawful: they are sadistic.” Experts said Hammouri was at risk of expulsion due to his alleged involvement in “terrorist activities” and “breach of allegiance” to ‘Israel’.
