OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (Palestine Foundation Information Center) The Israeli occupation authority (IOA) on Monday ordered the demolition of 13 homes of one family in the town of Anata, northeast of Jerusalem.
Local sources reported that the IOA ordered the Al-Fuhaidat family to evacuate 13 of their homes within 12 days, noting that the homes threatened with demolition belong to brothers and cousins from the Al-Fuhaidat family.
The Al-Fuhaidat family has been residing in the town since the 1950s, the sourced highlighted.
Earlier on Monday, Israeli occupation forces stormed the town of Al-Issawiya, northeast of occupied Jerusalem, and handed over demolition notices to the owners of a number of homes and facilities.
Local sources also reported that members of the occupied Jerusalem municipality, accompanied by Israeli occupation police, handed over demolition notices in the town, as well as summonses to house owners, on the pretext of unlicensed construction.
The Israeli occupation municipality of Jerusalem refuses to grant Palestinian citizens construction permits, forcing them to demolish their own houses or getting them knocked down by the municipality teams for unaffordable costs, in a procedure that contradicts international and humanitarian laws that guarantee the right to housing, within the framework of the occupation’s systematic practices to forcibly displace Palestinians from the city of Jerusalem, in exchange for expanding Jewish-only neighborhoods in the city and its surroundings.
Meanwhile, the IOA issued another decision on Monday to convert any land in the occupied city of Jerusalem whose owners cannot prove their ownership into what is known as “absentee property”, while preventing its owners from obtaining building permits.
The Jerusalem Governorate explained that the municipality began implementing this procedure in the Al-Sheikh Jarrah and Jabal Mukaber areas, specifically in the Al-Qanbar neighborhood and the lands near the wall near Abu Dis.
It pointed out that the IOA is working to expand the scope of these procedures to include all parts of Jerusalem, with a special focus on the town of Silwan, especially in the neighborhoods of Al-Bustan, Batn Al-Hawa, and Ein Al-Lawza.
The Absentee Property Law is a legislation issued by the IOA during the era of the first Israeli government led by David Ben-Gurion, to deal with the properties of Palestinians who were displaced in the 1948 war, and to facilitate its transfer to the Israelis.
