Israel stripped Palestinians of Occupied Jerusalem residency status last year at a faster rate than at any time in the history of the Jewish state, an Israeli rights group said Wednesday, citing official Israeli statistics. “Revocation of residence has reached frightening proportions,” said Dalia Kerstein, executive director of Israel's HaMoked Center for the Defence of the Individual. Statistics HaMoked obtained from the Ministry of Interior under a Freedom of Information Act request show 4,577 residents of occupied East Jerusalem had their residence revoked in 2008, which was greater than half the total revoked in the past 40 years. The United Nations, the United States and the European have criticized Israel's policies in Occupied Jerusalem, which include the eviction of Palestinians from homes whose ownership they cannot prove, demolition of housing built without Israeli permits, and expansion of settlements on land occupied since a 1967 war. The Palestinians say Israel's aim is to get rid of as many Palestinian residents as possible from East Jerusalem, to reduce their presence in its eastern districts and undermine the claim to half of the Holy City as capital of their future state. “The Interior Ministry campaign in 2008 is only part of a general policy whose aim is to limit the Palestinian population and preserve a Jewish majority in Jerusalem, whose future is supposed to be determined in negotiations,” Kerstein said. “The Palestinians are natives of this city, not residents who have recently arrived,” she added in a HaMoked statement. Israel annexed East Jerusalem after capturing the area in the 1967 Middle East war and regards all of the city as its capital, a claim not recognised internationally.
