RAMALLAH – The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Saturday called on the international community to prevent Israel from evicting Palestinians from their homes and lands in East Jerusalem. Sa'eb Erekat, a member of the PLO Executive Committee and head of its Negotiations Department, said that Israel will soon evict several Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Erekat said that 10 members of the Shamasneh family, including two elders and three children, will be evicted from their home for the benefit of Jewish settlers who will later take over the house. Palestinian sources said that at least 28 families of Sheikh Jarrah face eviction from their homes. Israel has evicted dozens of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah in the past two years. Israeli police cited a ruling by the High Court of Justice that the houses belong to Jewish settlers and that the Palestinian families have been living there illegally. The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was built by the UN and the Jordanian government in 1956 to house Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war. However, with the start of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, following the 1967 war, occupiers began claiming ownership of the land on which the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was built. According to Erekat, Sheikh Jarrah is particularly vulnerable to illegal Israeli expansion because it connects Jewish West Jerusalem, the Old City and Israeli settlements to the north and east. “Israel is once again showing its utter disregard for international law,” he said. Erekat said that Israel is violating the Fourth Geneva Convention which forbids it as an occupying power from altering the demographic composition of territories it has seized, either by expelling Palestinians or by settling Jews there. “New settlers from abroad are accommodating themselves and their belongings in Palestinian homes and the evicted Palestinians will have nowhere to sleep,” the PLO official said. He called on the international community “to intervene and stop the racist policies and the ethnic cleansing in the holy city.” Israel captured East Jerusalem in the June 1967 War, annexed it in 1980, and has since built settlements there that are home to some 300,000 Jewish settlers. Control over the city has been seen as the most sensitive and thorniest issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinians hope to make East Jerusalem the capital of their future state but Israel says the city is its eternal capital.
