[progchat_action] Human Rights Watch condemns East Jerusalem home demolitions
Steven Robinson
57 Palestinians Forced From Their Homes in One Week
Human Rights Watch November 6, 2009
(Jerusalem) - Israeli authorities in East Jerusalem should immediately
stop demolishing Palestinian homes in violation of international
law, Human Rights Watch said today.
In the week beginning October 27, 2009, Jerusalem municipal authorities
used bulldozers to demolish five residences, while thousands more
Palestinians are threatened with demolition of their homes. In the
demolitions of the five buildings from October 27 to November 2,
Israeli authorities displaced 57 Palestinian residents, including
many children. Three other buildings were partly demolished. Israeli
authorities justified destroying the homes primarily on the grounds
that the owners lacked building permits, which are extremely difficult
for Palestinians to obtain.
"The Israeli government is depriving Palestinians of the right to
live in their own homes, in neighborhoods where many have lived for
generations," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human
Rights Watch. "Basing this cruel destruction of people's homes on
unfairly applied building regulations is a thinly veiled legal
fagade to force them to move out."
Israel has forcibly evicted or demolished the homes of more than
600 Palestinians, half of them children, in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem this year, according to the United Nations. Israel's
imposition of its building laws on Palestinians in occupied territory
violates international humanitarian law protections for private
property. Its application of the building permits law is discriminatory
and is an arbitrary and unlawful interference in the home under
international human rights law.
Jerusalem municipal authorities demolished three Palestinian-owned
buildings on November 2, displacing 31 people. Residents of the
East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Tor told Human Rights Watch that
at 8 a.m., two bulldozers demolished the homes of the al-Shwaike
and al-Qawasmi families, displacing 14 people. The buildings,
joined by a common wall, were built in 1982.
"We didn't even know the building was going to be destroyed before
it happened," said Haroun al-Qawasmi, who lived in one of the
buildings with his wife and four adult children. "There were scores
of soldiers there, and they told us that we had built the house
without a permit."
Tareq al-Shwaike said that he was not informed of any demolition
order before his family's adjoining building was destroyed, displacing
him, his wife and three children, his mother, his sister and her
husband. "The municipality told me I have to clean up the ruins of
what they destroyed or else I'll have to pay when they do it,"
al-Shwaike said.
The third home, in the Beit Hanina neighborhood of East Jerusalem,
was destroyed at around 2 p.m. Human Rights Watch was unable to
contact residents of the building, but according to initial reports
by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and
by Al Maqdese, a Palestinian nongovernmental organization based in
East Jerusalem, the demolition displaced approximately 17 members
of the Rajaby family.
On October 27, Israeli authorities demolished two homes in East
Jerusalem, and partly destroyed three others. Residents of a two-story
building in the Sur Baher neighborhood of East Jerusalem told Human
Rights Watch that scores of Israeli soldiers and police officers
surrounded the building at 5:15 a.m. and ordered the residents to
leave immediately. The authorities did not allow the residents time
to remove their furniture or other belongings before three bulldozers
demolished the building, which housed 17 members of an extended
family, including five children.
"Soldiers entered our house without asking and detained my daughters
and sons," said one resident who did not want his name used. "We
only had time to get our clothes."
He said the building's first floor was built 11 years ago, and a
second floor was added later to accommodate the owner's married
children. A second resident said that his family had owned the
land on which the house was built for at least three generations.
The residents said the family had spent 150,000 shekels (US$37,500)
over the years in failed attempts to obtain a permit for their home.
At 9 a.m. on the same day, Israeli authorities demolished the East
Jerusalem home of a 73-year-old Palestinian woman and her 32-year-old
son, who did not want to be named. The son said he had constructed
the building from pieces of wood and metal sheeting after Israeli
authorities demolished their initial home on the site in 2006.
"We have been living on this site for 40 years," he said. "They
destroyed our first house because we didn't have a permit. So I put
up the zinco (sheet metal) building. It wasn't a permanent building,
just a hut."
He received a first demolition order in May and a second one in
September. "I can't afford a lawyer so I went to the court myself,
but they told me, You don't have a file here.'" He was afraid the
authorities would punish him further by fining him for the demolition.
East Jerusalem includes more than 70 square kilometers of the West
Bank that Israel annexed to its territory in 1967, and remains
occupied territory under international law. The Fourth Geneva
Convention of 1949 regarding occupied territories prohibits the
occupying power from destroying private property unless such
destruction is "rendered absolutely necessary by military operations."
Israeli authorities state that house demolitions are carried out
against homes that have been built illegally without official
building permits. However, a UN report published in April found
that it is extremely difficult for Palestinian residents to obtain
such permits under Israeli law, which Israel applies to annexed
parts of the West Bank in violation of international law.
The UN estimated that roughly 60,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem
currently live in buildings that the Israeli government has designated
illegal. A December 2008 report by the European Union (EU) found
that Israel was "actively pursuing the illegal annexation of East
Jerusalem" by means including the construction of Jewish-only
settlements and demolitions of Palestinian houses.
The European Union report concluded that Israel's housing policies
in East Jerusalem unlawfully discriminate against Palestinian
residents. Like Israeli citizens, Palestinian residents of East
Jerusalem may obtain building permits only for buildings in areas
zoned for construction. The Palestinian population makes up over
60 percent of East Jerusalem's population, but the Israeli government
has zoned only 12 percent for Palestinian construction, according
to the EU report. Even in this small zoned area, many Palestinians
could not afford to complete the application process for building
permits, which is complicated and expensive.
In contrast, Israel unlawfully expropriated 35 percent of East
Jerusalem for the construction of Jewish settlements, for which
building permits are much easier to obtain. Since November 2007,
Israel approved building permits for 3,000 housing units for Jewish
settlers in East Jerusalem, as opposed to fewer than 400 building
permits for Palestinian residents, according to the EU report.
Government policy, as stated in the Local Outline Plan for Jerusalem
2000, approved by Jerusalem's Local Committee for Planning and
Building in 2006, calls for a ratio of 70 percent Jews to 30 percent
Arabs in the Jerusalem municipality, including annexed parts of the
West Bank.
The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the occupying power from
transferring its own population to the occupied territory.
"The Israeli government is destroying the homes of Palestinian
families and causing unnecessary suffering so that it can expand
illegal Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem," Whitson said. "Israel
needs to respect the basic rights of Palestinian families to property
and housing."
Human Rights Watch interviewed other East Jerusalem residents whose
homes were partly or completely demolished in three separate incidents
on October 27.
Israeli authorities may impose heavy fines for illegal construction
on Palestinians whose homes they bulldoze, so some East Jerusalem
residents have "self-demolished" their homes to avoid financial
penalties. One resident had begun but not completed "self-demolishing"
his building when it was bulldozed, and was afraid of being fined
by Israeli authorities. Another family whose home was demolished
was still paying a fine of 60,000 shekels (US$15,000) for illegal
construction.
The Jerusalem municipality spokesperson's office did not immediately
respond to Human Rights Watch's request for comment on the demolitions.
According to the municipality's website, "The Municipality of
Jerusalem demolishes buildings or parts of buildings for reasons
of urban planning, not for security matters . . . Municipal policy
is to issue demolition orders only where illegal buildings are not
yet occupied and where they interfere with plans for public facilities
such as schools or roads, or with the city's historical heritage."
Israel's policy of demolishing the homes of Palestinians in East
Jerusalem on the basis of difficult-to-obtain building permits,
while facilitating the construction and growth of nearby Jewish
settlements, is also discriminatory under international law. The
prohibition against discrimination is spelled out in Article 2 of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and codified in the major
human rights treaties that Israel has ratified, including the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
(ICESCR).
Ongoing and repeated home demolitions prevent residents of East
Jerusalem from enjoying the right not to be subjected to arbitrary
or unlawful state interference with one's home and the right to
adequate housing. The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights, which monitors the compliance of states with the ICESCR,
has stated that "the right to housing should not be interpreted in
a narrow or restrictive sense which equates it with, for example,
the shelter provided by merely having a roof over one's head or
views shelter exclusively as a commodity. Rather it should be seen
as the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity."
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/11/06/israel-stop-east-jerusalem-home-demolit
ions
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