By Meredith Lee-Clark

Impunity Watch Reporter, Middle East

 

EAST JERUSALEM, Israel/West Bank – The Israeli Interior Ministry stripped 4,577 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem of their residency rights during 2008, according to official state records released on December 3. The total was twenty-one times higher than the average number during the past forty years, and the highest total since the beginning of the Israeli rule over East Jerusalem.

 

The Interior Ministry said the drastic increase was due to an investigation into the legal status of thousands of East Jerusalem residents during March and April 2008. The Ministry said that most of those whose permits were revoked were no longer in Israel; ninety-nine were minors under the age of eighteen.

 

Israel began its rule over predominantly-Palestinian East Jerusalem after the 1967 War. During the first forty years of Israeli occupation, from 1967 to 2007, the Interior Ministry deprived a total of 8,558 Palestinians of their residency permits. Of all the Palestinians who lost their residency rights in the past forty-two years, 35% lost theirs in 2008.

 

Yotam Ben-Hillel, an attorney with Hamoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual, said that Palestinians in East Jerusalem are treated the same as legal immigrants to Israel and are not entitled to citizenship under the Law of Return. Residents can easily lose their status, and once a Palestinian has lost his or her residency status, it can be extremely difficult or impossible to return to Jerusalem for any reason, even for a family visit.

 

“The list may include students who went for a few years to study in another country, and can no longer return to their homes,” said Ben-Hillel.

 

Those who had their residency permits revoked may not be associated with any other nation, so the individuals may now by stateless.

 

Palestinians have attacked the Interior Ministry’s actions, saying it undermines the feasibility of the Palestinian plan to have East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also excluded East Jerusalem from the recent freeze in settlement construction.

 

For more information, please see:

 

Financial Times – Israel Strips Thousands of Palestinians of Jerusalem Residency – 3 December 2009

 

Ha’aretz – Israel Stripped Thousands of Jerusalem Arabs of Residency in 2008 – 2 December 2009

 

Jordan Times – Israel Strips More Palestinians of Their Palestinian Status – 2 December 2009

 

Ma’an News Agency – Thousands in East Jerusalem Lost Residency Rights – 2 December 2009