RAMALLAH (Xinhua/MEMO) – Palestinian authorities have condemned the Zionist regime’s forcible expelling of Salah al-Hamouri, a French-Palestinian lawyer and rights activist, resident of East Al-Quds, to France.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the deportation of al-Hamouri “is an outrageous step committed by the illegal occupation and a war crime that is added to its long list of crimes committed against the Palestinians.”
It urged the international community, including France, “to hold Israel accountable for its ongoing crimes, including the forcible displacement of the lawyer Al-Hamouri.”
“We call on the UN Security Council to uphold its obligations and bring an end to Israel’s continuous war crimes,” it said.
The Zionist authorities deported al-Hamouri to France at midnight, “although the legal procedures that were scheduled in his case had not yet ended, including the objection to withdrawing his identity,” said the Palestinian Prisoners Club Association, a Palestinian non-governmental organization.
Meanwhile, the occupying regime’s ministry of the interior refused to grant residency to 13,000 Palestinian residents of Al-Quds from 1995 to the present day, according to a report by Haaretz on Monday.
The occupation authorities claimed the Palestinians’ center of life was no longer Al-Quds, but rather abroad or in the occupied West Bank.
In recent years, human rights organizations have submitted petitions to the regime’s so-called supreme court against the ministry of the interior on behalf of many Al-Quds residents who have been denied residency or stripped of it. In all its decisions, the Supreme Court stated that the Palestinians in Al-Quds are indigenous people with rights and should not be treated as migrants, but despite this, the ministry continues its policy of stripping them of residency permits and expelling them.