Israel stripped Palestinians of Jerusalem residency status last year at a faster rate than at any time in the history of the Jewish state, an Israeli rights group said on Wednesday, citing official Israeli statistics. "Revocation of residence has reached frightening proportions," said Dalia Kerstein, executive director of Israel's HaMoked Center for the Defence of the Individual.
Statistics HaMoked obtained from the Ministry of Interior under a Freedom of Information Act request show 4,577 residents of East Jerusalem had their residence revoked in 2008, which was greater than half the total revoked in the past 40 years. The United Nations, the United States and the European have criticised Israel's policies in Jerusalem, which include the eviction of Palestinians from homes whose ownership they cannot prove, demolition of housing built without Israeli permits, and expansion of settlements on land occupied since a 1967 war.
The Palestinians say Israel's aim is to get rid of as many Palestinian residents as possible from East Jerusalem, to reduce their presence in its eastern districts and undermine the claim to half of the Holy City as capital of their future state. "The Interior Ministry campaign in 2008 is only part of a general policy whose aim is to limit the Palestinian population and preserve a Jewish majority in Jerusalem, whose future is supposed to be determined in negotiations," Kerstein said.
Israel annexed East Jerusalem after capturing the area in the 1967 Middle East war and regards all of the city as its capital, a claim not recognised internationally. Some 250,000 Palestinians now live in East Jerusalem and adjacent suburbs alongside 200,000 Israelis.
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects calls for the city to be divided or shared as part of a peace agreement. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Wednesday quoted an internal European Union document as saying Israel was helping Jewish right-wing zealots to implement its "strategic vision" of changing the demographics.
At the same time, the paper quoted the EU report as saying, the Israeli-run municipality was depriving Palestinians of needed building permits and providing them with inferior health, sanitation and educational services. While 35 percent of Jerusalem citizens are Arab, less than 10 percent of the city's budget goes to Arab areas, the EU internal report said.
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