Israeli court evicts Palestinian family and shop owner from Muslim quarter in Jerusalem's Old City

 Ghazi Zalloum in front of the house that he has been ordered to leave.

Israel's Supreme Court on Monday ordered two Palestinians to leave their properties in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, ruling that the properties were owned by Jews, their lawyer told AFP.

Lawyer Mohammed Dahleh said the court had rejected his clients' appeals, and ruled that Ghazi Zalloum's house and Ismail Wazwaz's shop had been owned by Jews in the period before the establishment of Israel in 1948, with the properties later falling into Jordan's hands.
"It went through the Magistrates Court, the District Court and now the Supreme Court," Dahleh said, adding that the court had also ordered the Palestinians to pay all the legal costs.
Both properties are in the Al-Qarameh neighbourhood between the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al Aqsa mosque compound.

Zalloum told AFP there had been a systematic takeover by settlers of properties in the area."With my evacuation, Israel has evacuated half of the Al-Qarameh neighbourhood and Aqbat al-Khaldiyya as part of an organised policy of emptying the Old City," he charged. The identity of the Jewish owners who won the court battle were not immediately clear.
I saw that some rightist zionist blogs called the evicted Palestinians 'squatters'. Maybe I would be able to understand this qualification if Jewish courts would also allow Palestinian owners to evict the Jewish 'squatters' that took over their homes in 1948. In Jerusalem alone the number of houses taken over from Palestinians after  1948 runs into the thousands, but contrary to Jewish owners, Palestinians are not able to claim their rights. 
 
Also on Monday Israeli officials issued an eviction order to a home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Wafa news agency reported. The eviction notice was issued to Fatima Salamieh, who has lived in the home since the 1950's. The Salamieh family say that the authorities want to hand the property over to settlers, who claim it is owned by Jews. On April 18, Israeli police forcibly evicted two branches of the Natsheh family after an Israeli court ruled in favor of settlers, who moved into their houses.