Disabled Palestinian evicted-home of 50 years

Daily mail

Israeli police evicted a disabled Palestinian man and his wife from the Jerusalem home in which they have lived for more than 50 years, despite the intervention of the United States.

A Jerusalem court in July ruled that the east Jerusalem housing provided to Mohammed al-Kurd and his wife Fawzieh in 1956 by the Jordanian government and a U.N. refugee agency, was built on land to which their title was in doubt.The court ordered that they must vacate the property.

Yesterday police removed the wheelchair-bound al-Kurd and his wife from the building before dawn. The couple plan to stay with neighbours while they search for a new home.

U.S. Consulate spokeswoman Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm said American diplomats 'raised the issue of this particular family with the Israelis last summer'.

She could not say if they would make a formal protest following the eviction.

A Jewish group says it has papers dating back to Ottoman times proving that the land was originally owned by Jews who fled when Jordanian troops overran east Jerusalem in the fighting which accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948.

The couple, now in their 60s, became refugees when the newly-established Israeli state took over their family holdings in west Jerusalem and the Mediterranean port of Jaffa in 1948, neighbours said.
During the two-year war that followed the establishment of the state of Israel, about 700,000 Arabs fled or were evicted from their land, becoming refugees.

In 1956, along with other refugee families, the al-Kurds were rehoused in east Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah quarter by Jordan, which ruled there until ousted by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

Israeli and Palestinian rights groups say the move against them after all these years is the result of a long legal battle between the al-Kurds and Jewish groups who inhabit a building next door and seek to expand their enclave in the predominantly Arab Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said officers carried out the court ruling against the couple, and he was not aware of any further action pending.

A senior Palestinian official who visited the site yesterday said the eviction was an inhumane act which soured Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

'The president has raised this in talks with Israel all the time, but the Israelis seem not to be listening at the moment,' said Rafiq Husseini, chief of staff to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

'It is damaging the peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis. They have to halt their settlers or they will not have peace with us ever.'

Christopher Gunness, spokesman of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which cares for Palestinian refugees, described the nighttime removal of the al-Kurds as 'shameful.'

'As we have in the past, we will continue to offer the family assistance,' he said in a statement. 'But nothing we offer can compensate for the loss of a home. We advocate against and oppose the eviction of all our refugees.'

Rabbi Arik Ascherman of the Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights said enforcing property claims dating from before 1948 could boomerang on Israelis, many of whom today live in homes abandoned by Palestinians during the fighting then.

'I can't say with 100 percent certainty that the land (where the al-Kurds lived) didn't belong before 1948 to the Jewish families,' he said.

'The question is, do any of us as Israelis really want to go back to the situation where everyone owns what they owned in 1948?'