Saturday 26 Dec 2015 - 18:44 Makkah mean time-15-3-1437
Jerusalem (IINA) - Two Palestinians have taken refuge in an International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) office in Jerusalem in defiance of an Israeli order banning them from entering their home town for several months, Al Jazeera News channel reported.
Samer Abu Eisheh, a 28-year-old freelance journalist from occupied East Jerusalem, recently received orders from the Israeli military informing him that he was banned from Jerusalem for five months. Another Jerusalemite, 32-year-old Saleh Abu Sbeih, was handed a six-month ban. "I don't know why they are giving me a military order," Abu Eisheh said, speaking to Al Jazeera by telephone from inside the ICRC office. "I am a media man." Abu Eisheh said he expected Israeli forces to arrest him nonetheless. Asked why he and Abu Sbeih chose the ICRC office, he said that "no place in Jerusalem is safe, but the ICRC" was the most secure option.
"We know at the end of the day they will arrest us - tomorrow, after a week, at some point. We will not make it easy and we will raise our voices. "I don't have any place to go," he said. "That's why we are not going anywhere." Israeli forces regularly arrest influential members of Palestinian communities, including political leaders, and activists, according to rights organizations. Addameer Prisoner Support Network, a West Bank-based rights group, has documented at least 6,700 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, including 450 who are held as administrative detainees without charges or trial.
Yet in East Jerusalem, Israel often subjects Palestinian residents to house arrest orders and city bans, among other measures. "Israel is increasingly resorting to banning Palestinian Jerusalemites from their city and expelling them from it," said Rafat Sub Laban, Addameer's advocacy unit coordinator. "In the past month, four Palestinians received similar bans by the Israeli military which de facto forcibly displaced them from their city," Sub Laban added.
He said that Israeli authorities resorted to city bans and house arrest orders "as an easier alternative [to arrest] in order to target social and human rights activists, especially when they have no grounds to arrest them". Noting that the uptick in Jerusalem bans comes on the heels of an ongoing crackdown on Palestinians in the city, Sub Laban described the measure as "part of a larger policy aimed at imposing control through collective punishment and discriminatory laws and practices". At the time of publication, an Israeli military spokesperson had not replied to Al Jazeera's request for a comment.
Abu Eisheh was first arrested on August 17 after returning from a trip to Lebanon, where he participated in an Arab youth camp with people from across the region. "The [Israeli] occupation is scared of youth activists," Abu Eisheh said, explaining that he was told he was being held on "secret evidence" when he was first arrested. According to Abu Eisheh, Israel "doesn't want us to have communication with people outside. They are scared of us telling the world what is happening to Palestinians in Jerusalem". He said Israeli intelligence officers interrogated him for 44 days before eventually releasing him. "They were asking me about Lebanon, why I went there, who I met," he said. "The first two weeks they interrogated me 17-20 hours each day." Upon being released, he was then placed under indefinite house arrest. But 81 days later, an Israeli court sent him a military order informing him that he was banned from the city for five months.
HA/IINA
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