Quds city, November 10, SPA -- Israeli police on Sunday 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 and they must vacate the property, according to a report of Associated Press. Police removed the wheelchair-bound al-Kurd and his wife from the building before dawn on Sunday. They plan to stay with neighbors 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. 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, neighbors 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. Many were housed in camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the 1967 war, Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.
