Israel evicts east Jerusalem Palestinian family after legal fight

Police evicted a Palestinian family from their home in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem Tuesday to make way for Jewish settlers after a long legal battle, officials and an AFP correspondent said.

Since 1978, the Sub Laban family had fought in the Israeli courts against their eviction from their home in the Muslim Quarter of the walled Old City.

But early on Tuesday, police arrived to remove the family from their home following a court order.

"They do not have the right to expel me from my house," Nora Abu Laban, 68, told AFP.

"They are thieves and they steal everything from us, they stole the house, the lands, the youth."

Israeli and Palestinian activists jostled with police in the aftermath of the eviction.

One held a placard that read "A family was evicted today" as Jewish settlers looked on, video footage filmed by AFP showed.

In May, the Sub Laban family had been served with an eviction notice and told to vacate the building by June 11.

The "family was forcibly evicted from their home by Israeli police," Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for Palestinians, said in a statement.

He said 12 Israeli activists protesting against the eviction, seven women and five men, were arrested.

"Concerted efforts to evict Palestinians from their homes in occupied east Jerusalem may amount to forcible transfer," Sunghay said.

"Forcible transfer is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime."

The European Union expressed "regret" over the decision.

It urged the "Israeli government to respect international law and let these families live where they have been living for decades".

Hazem Qasem, a spokesperson for Hamas, the Islamist group which controls the coastal Gaza Strip enclave, described the eviction as a "crime" and part of the "Zionist war on the Arab identity of Jerusalem".

The Jewish settlers are part of an organisation called Atara Leyoshna.

The Israeli plaintiffs claimed that Jews lived in the building before the division of the holy city into Israeli and Jordanian sectors following the proclamation of the Jewish state in 1948.

They invoke an Israeli law from the 1970s that allows Jews to reclaim property owned by Jews before 1948, even if they are not related.

According to anti-settlement watchdog Ir Amim, some 150 Palestinian families in Jerusalem's Old City and nearby neighbourhoods are currently threatened with eviction because of "discriminatory laws and state collusion with settler organisations".

The group says such evictions are part of "a strategy to cement Israeli hegemony of the Old City basin, the most religiously and politically sensitive part of Jerusalem and a core issue of the conflict".

Israel captured Jerusalem's Old City in the 1967 Six-Day War, before annexing it in a move regarded as illegal by the UN.