April 15, 2016•Update: April 18, 2016
By Kaamil Ahmed
JERUSALEM
Palestinian human rights groups have called on the international community to pressure Israel to stop revoking Palestinian Jerusalemites' residency permits based on "breach of allegiance to the state of Israel."
A coalition of six organizations working in Jerusalem invited diplomats to a conference in the city on Thursday, where they said the punitive measure was at risk of becoming official policy.
Munir Nuseibah, director of al-Quds University's Community Action Center, said there were 13 known cases of the Israeli Ministry of Interior using the criteria, but that it was an increasing trend that needed to be highlighted.
"If the criterion of allegiance is cemented in the Israeli legal system, many Palestinians will lose their residency," he said, claiming that if legalized by an Israeli Supreme Court ruling, the policy would affect thousands of Jerusalemites who should not be expected to feel loyal to Israel.
He said that while the new allegiance criterion was not explicitly used against all, there was a trend of the controversial female "Murabitaat" activists, who protest Israeli visits to Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, having their permits revoked and being told it was because they had moved their "center of life" away from Jerusalem, despite still living in the city.
Aseil Abu Baker, a lawyer at the al-Haq human rights group, said the policy of punitive residency revocations left Palestinian Jerusalemites "in perpetual fear and uncertainty".
"It's all a part of Israel's [policy of] controlling the largest amount of land with the fewest number of Palestinians living on it," she said.
The unofficial criterion was used by Israel in January to revoke the permits of three Palestinian teens accused of throwing stones at Israeli cars and a 21-year-old man involved in a fatal gun attack.
In February, Israeli human rights group HaMoked launched a petition in the Israeli high court to contest the interior ministry's right to revoke permits for "breach of allegiance".
The policy was first used in 2006 to revoke the permits of three Palestinian politicians considered to be senior members of the Hamas movement's political wing.
After Israel took control of occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, its Palestinian population has required residency permits to live in the city but Israel has revoked permits more than 14,500 times since then, according to Palestinian human rights groups.
