Mubasher map expert: Jordanian documents confirm that Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood is a pure Palestinian property

Khalil Takfji, an expert in maps and settlement at Orient House, said that the documents extracted from the Ottoman archives confirm that the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, especially the homes claimed by Israeli settlers, are pure Palestinian property, but the Israeli occupation has been working for more than a decade to transfer the ownership of these homes to the settlers With the aim of breaking up the neighborhood’s unity.

During his participation in the evening session, yesterday, Thursday, on Al-Jazeera Mubasher, Takfaji added that papers had been reached from the Jordanian Foreign Ministry confirming the ownership of these homes for the Jerusalemite residents, according to an agreement between the Kingdom of Jordan and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the 1950s.

28 Palestinian refugee families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem face daily threats of expulsion from their homes.

The story of these Palestinian families began by resorting to the neighborhood after the Nakba in 1956 during the Jordanian rule of the West Bank, but since 1972 these Jerusalemite families have been fighting through the Israeli courts to prevent their displacement.

Takfaji stressed that what is happening today in East Jerusalem is an ethnic cleansing and an attempt to encircle the Palestinian neighborhoods with units and outposts, and after controlling them, the phase of expelling the Jerusalemites begins.

Takfaji added that the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood is one of the most important neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which still preserves its Jerusalem privacy. Therefore, the goal of Israel is to break up the neighborhood and gradually transfer its ownership from a Palestinian Jerusalem property to an Israeli ownership, highlighting in the same context that Palestinian fears stem from the fact that “the court The Israeli Supreme Council and the judges are all Jews and strive to Judaize the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

For his part, Hatem Abdel Qader, the former Palestinian minister for Jerusalem affairs, explained that the documents handed over to the lawyer of the families threatened with eviction will be included in the file and presented to the Israeli Supreme Court, next Monday.

Abdel Qader revealed that these documents may not change much in the course of the case, but it is very important for the Israeli court to understand that these documents confirm the existence of an agreement between the Jordanian government and UNRWA, and that neither Israel nor the settlers have anything to do with it.

Abdel Qader was afraid of the final decision of the Israeli Supreme Court, which had previously recommended reaching a settlement between Jerusalemites and settlers, a settlement that the residents of Sheikh Jarrah rejected because it includes an acknowledgment of settlers’ ownership of these homes and lands.

Abdel Fattah Skafi, one of the affected residents in Sheikh Jarrah, said that the Palestinian families were subjected to bargaining, but we “reject all settlements as long as the matter concerns Palestinian land that is not subject to Judaization.”

He added, “My people were displaced from West Jerusalem to East Jerusalem during the Nakba, and these housing units, along with the food ration cards, were delivered by UNRWA to Jerusalemites in the year 1950 under the auspices of the Kingdom of Jordan.”

“We reject all settlements that try to Judaize these Jerusalem homes, and we refuse to be a protected population.” This comes at a time when Arab and international campaigns of solidarity with the neighborhood’s residents escalate against the provocations of Israeli settlers backed by the occupation forces.

On the field level, the Jerusalemite journalist Renad Sharbati said that the attacks of the Israeli occupation forces increased their intensity this Thursday, especially after one of the settlers sprayed pepper gas on the fasting people before the sunset prayer, which caused the outbreak of confrontations that included an attack on the Jerusalem population, during which more than 20 Palestinians were injured. .