The court asked the families by Tuesday to submit their responses to a plan that would offer them protected tenancy status for 15 years in exchange for accepting a rent payment of 2,400 shekels ($750) per year. Through – that the land belongs to Nahalat Simeon Ltd., a Jewish settler organization seeking to develop the area for Jewish housing.
Announcing their position at a news conference in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, the family members said the court’s proposal was a means to temporarily delay plans to remove them from their homes and confiscate the land.
Families have been living in Sheikh Jarrah since the 1950s after fleeing homes over the past decade in Haifa, Jaffa and other cities, which became part of the State of Israel. They say their position is unfair because they have not been able to reclaim the original homes they were in, while standing to lose the dwellings for which they granted refugee status more than 60 years ago.
Tension in the neighborhood escalated earlier this year when it appeared that the case was coming to a conclusion, and which Hamas used as an excuse to launch rockets into Jerusalem, sparking an 11-day fight between Gaza militants and the Israeli military. The war started.
A Hamas-affiliated organization made its opposition to the high court’s proposal clear, writing in a letter to one of the lawyers involved that they had a “national, moral and legal responsibility” to reject it.
Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority, also said that it has “unequivocally informed the families and their lawyers that we are clearly against the proposal, and we will stand with them and allow them to be thrown out on the street.” won’t allow it.”
But the family members denied that they had taken the decision under pressure, saying they had arrived independently.
There has been no response from the high court, but the judges have previously said they will issue a binding decision at some point if their motion is rejected.
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