Israel is deporting Palestinian lawyer to France
-
Sulaiman
- . December 2, 2022
- . Update: December 2, 2022 8:46 pm
After announcing to strip a Palestinian lawyer of his Jerusalem residency, Israel has announced that it is now planning to deport him to France, over charges that the man is an activist belonging to a banned militant group. The decision by Israel’s Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked highlights the extremely vulnerable status of Jerusalem’s Palestinians, who “hold revocable Israeli residency rights but with few exceptions are not citizens”.
Salah Hammouri, a Palestinian lawyer, has been held in administrative detention in Israel since March. Shaked said that “after Hammouri’s detention expires this weekend, he would be deported to France as quickly as possible”. Hammouri is a Jerusalem resident but is also a holder of French citizenship. “We must fight terrorism with all the tools at our disposal,” she said. “It is not acceptable for terrorists like Hammouri to gain status in Israel.”
Israel has made allegations that Hammouri is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a group declared as a terrorist organization both by Israel and the United States. He has also worked as a lawyer for Adameer, which is a rights group working to help Palestinian prisoners who have been banned by Israel for alleged ties to the PFLP.
Read | Palestine has legal right to become state member of UN: Riyad Mansour
Amnesty International’s Middle East director, Heba Morayef, said, “Salah Hammouri has already spent nine months in administrative detention without charge or trial this year, in retaliation for his tireless campaigning for an end to Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians.”
“These latest plans are not only a shameless attempt to hinder Salah’s human rights work, they are also an expression of the Israeli authorities’ chilling long-term policy aim of reducing the number of Palestinians in East Jerusalem.”
The decision to deport Hammouri has been strongly condemned by UN rights experts. “Israel’s acts of forcibly deporting protected persons from the occupied territory and forcing their allegiance to the occupying power, would constitute grave breaches of international humanitarian law, and may amount to a war crime,” the experts have warned.
