The Israeli Supreme Court on Thursday denied a Jerusalemite family’s appeal against their eviction and refused to hear a case on the ownership of the building Haaretz Hebrew newspaper reported.
The ruling will force 40 family members including 30 children to leave their homes in occupied Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood within months.
The ruling will also make it very difficult for dozens of other Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah to avoid eviction.
According to the paper the family has been in Sheikh Jarrah since 1956 though they were originally refugees from Jaffa. Their two former houses in Jaffa still exist and they keep pictures of them in their living room.
According to the Absentees’ Property Law a building that belonged to people before 1948 is considered abandoned and therefore state property though this usually is not applied to property owned by Jews.
The Sabags have been fighting an eviction order since 2008. Their lawyers filed suit in district court saying that the land was not properly registered in the Land Registry and asked the court to rule on the ownership. The lawyers say they checked the Ottoman registry documents including those in the imperial archives in Istanbul and found problems with the documentation.
The district court declined to hear the case saying the statute of limitations had expired because the land was registered long ago. The Sabags appealed to the Supreme Court but last week after a short hearing the three justices hearing the appeal denied the request and upheld the lower court’s ruling.
