Several Palestinian citizens from al-Bustan neighborhood in the east Jerusalem district of Silwan received summonses for questioning from the Israeli municipality in Occupied Jerusalem on Tuesday morning.
The summonses were delivered by a municipal crew escorted by police forces to the homeowners who refused to comply with Israeli court demolition orders against their homes issued years ago.
The homes threatened with demolition in al-Bustan had been built many decades ago and hundreds of Palestinians live in them.
Fakhri Abu Diyab member of the Silwan Land Defense Committee warned that the Israeli occupation authority (IOA) covets the 70-dunum al-Bustan neighborhood which has been an Islamic mortmain property since the time of Caliph Othman pointing out that the neighborhood is about 300 meters away from the southern wall of the Aqsa Mosque.
Abu Diyab accused the IOA of persistently seeking to expel the local Palestinian residents and send them away from the neighborhoods adjacent to the Aqsa Mosque in order to impose its control over the entire area around the holy site as a prelude to building a biblical park.
He affirmed that there are 100 homes threatened with eviction in the neighborhood at the pretext they were built without permits although many of them had been built before the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem.
“The occupation is trying to portray the attack [on al-Bustan] as a legal issue but the truth is that it is a political ideological attack aimed at expelling the Jerusalemites from the area around the Aqsa Mosque breaking their will and weakening them as part of its ethnic cleansing policy and its plan to create new faits accomplis and demographic imbalance in favor of the settlers” the local official said.
