Occupied Jerusalem: Jewish colonists forced their way into a disputed house in east Jerusalem on Tuesday, using hired guards to evict an elderly Palestinian woman and tossing the other residents' belongings into the rain-swept yard.
The colonists displayed what they said was a court order granting them ownership of the simple one-story building. Human rights groups said the takeover was a push by Jewish colonists to expand their presence in east Jerusalem.
Sovereignty over the traditionally Arab sector is one of the most explosive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel captured the area in the 1967 Mideast war and immediately annexed it _ a move recognized by no other country. The Palestinians consider east Jerusalem the capital of their hoped-for state.
Palestinians and their Israeli supporters clashed with the Jewish colonists after they took over the building, and police intervened to restore calm, arresting one of the Israeli protesters, a police spokesman said.
Similar clashes have broken out over nearby buildings in recent months.
"It's clear to me that this is another case of settlers [colonists] taking the law into their own hands," said Rabbi Yehiel Grenimann of Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli group that opposes Palestinian home evictions and demolitions.
"It's just another step-by-step way of pushing them (the Palestinians) out," he said.
Grenimann said 29 members of the Al Kurd family lived in the house evicted on Tuesday. Some of them had settled there after they were evicted from another house in the same neighbourhood, following the Israeli Supreme Court's decision to uphold the colonists' claim to the ownership of that building.
Israel has built homes for more than 180,000 Jews in new east Jerusalem neighbourhoods since the 1967 annexation.
The US and others have criticised Israeli colonies in east Jerusalem and urged Israel to stop evicting Palestinians and demolishing their homes there, saying such moves disrupt peace efforts.
