Ramallah: Israel’s Amidar state-owned Housing Company has published tenders for public auctions to sell five Palestinian properties classified under Israel’s Absentee Property Law, Israeli’s major legal instrument for seizing Palestinian property.
Sami Abu Shehadah, a political activist and former member of Jaffa (Yaffa) municipal board, said that the five properties are located in the city of Yaffa and are owned by Palestinian refugees who were forced to flee the historic Palestine when Israel was created in 1948.
He said that those properties, two shops and three houses, were seized by the Israeli authorities and put under the guard of absentee property.
“This publication of plans to sell five Palestinian owned properties is an episode in a planned chain of auctions ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be rid of all legal responsibility for Palestinian properties within the state of Israel,” said Shehadah in a statement warning about the unprecedented increase in the number of Palestinian owned properties put up for sale.
Amidar’s publication of public auctions of Palestinian properties has drawn public criticism and categorical refusal from the 1948 areas.
Inhabitants of those areas demand that privately owned properties should be returned to their original owners even after centuries and that Israel does not have either the legal or the ethical right to sell those properties.
“Israel wants to completely eliminate the right of return of millions of Palestinians in Diaspora and that goal cannot be achieved by killing and burying their properties.
“Those Palestinians and their descendants have and hold official documents which prove their undisputed ownership of those properties,” Shehadah said.
He said that the residents of Yaffa suffer fatal shortages in the number of available housing units and that the Israeli government is not ready to address this housing issue within the Arab communities in Yaffa but is happy to sell Arab owned properties to Jews.
Shehadah maintained that the Israeli government had been handling the absentees’ properties without any kind of objection from any party and is making life for the Arab residents of Yaffa and the entire 1948 areas more and more difficult.
