The Israeli Supreme Court issued on Tuesday a ruling providing for converting the ownership of a Palestinian house in occupied Jerusalem to the Israeli settlers in ten years from now.
Ahmed Sub-Laban said that the Israeli court’s ruling allows his parents to stay in their house in the Old City for ten years starting from Tuesday without letting their children stay with them.
He added that after ten years the Israeli settlers will be able to own the house and turn it into an outpost in the heart of the Old City.
The Israeli Supreme Court held on Monday a hearing to consider the appeal filed by Sub-Laban family on the evacuation ruling issued in 2014 by the Magistrate Court in favor of a settlement association.
The court proposed a compromise granting Noura Ghaith and her husband Mustafa Sub-Laban a protected tenancy status. However their children the third generation will be excluded from this.
The Israeli settlers rejected the court’s proposal and insisted on evacuating the house while their lawyers suggested transferring the family to a small store which was faced with outright disapproval. The hearing ended without reaching a satisfactory compromise.
Many settlement associations have been trying for years to force the Sub-Labans out of their house backed up by pressures exerted by the Israeli occupation authorities (IOA) on the family including preventing them from making any repairs or restorations for the house in the seventies of the past century or blocking the entrance of the house by Israeli settlers a decade later.
In 2010 the IOA gave the house to the Kollel Galicia Trust a private settler group who claimed that the house is originally a Jewish endowment and called for evacuating the Sub-Labans from it claiming that the family do not live in it.
Despite all the Israeli pressure and harassment the Sub-Laban family stood steadfast in the Israeli courts for more than 20 years until they managed to regain their right to stay in it even though temporarily.
According to the United Nations’ Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UOCHA) at least 180 Palestinian families in occupied Jerusalem are under the threat of being forced out of their houses due to the court cases filed against them by Israeli settlers or settlement associations under the pretext of lacking the ownership of the properties or losing the protected tenant status.
