The Israeli authorities have started steps to expel Franco-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri, at the heart of a dispute between Israel and France, the Israeli Interior Ministry told AFP on Thursday.
Salah Hamouri, an activist of the Palestinian cause accused by Israel - despite the denials of the lawyer - of being an active member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a movement deemed terrorist by the Jewish state, had was arrested on June 30 in Jerusalem, then released after a week of detention.
Read also: Franco-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri released in Israel
According to the Israeli embassy in France, the lawyer, who defends Palestinian prisoners, had been arrested
"as part of an anti-terrorist police operation".
To be released, Salah Hamouri had to pay a bond, commit not to speak for three months to certain people and be ready to make himself
"available for possible summons of justice"
, had indicated in July the Quai d'Orsay who had followed the case.
But, Thursday, the Israeli Minister of the Interior Arié Dery, figurehead of the ultra-Orthodox party Shass, informed Salah Hamouri of
"his intention (...) to revoke his permanent status in Israel",
according to the services of the ministry.
Born in Jerusalem to a French mother and a Palestinian father, Salah Hamouri had been imprisoned between 2005 and 2011, an Israeli court having found him guilty of the plan to assassinate Ovadia Yosef, former chief rabbi of Israel and founder of the Shass party. , died in 2013. Palestinians born in Jerusalem, a city whose eastern part was annexed by the Jewish state in 1967, do not have Israeli nationality, unless they apply for it, but a permanent residence permit allows them to live and work in Israeli territory.
Without this permit, Salah Hamouri could therefore no longer stay in Jerusalem or on Israeli territory, which would lead to his expulsion.
"Israel not having succeeded in forcing him (...) to leave Palestine, it now intends to expel him purely and simply from his native land",
reacted Thursday in a statement the NGO France-Palestine which asked the French and European authorities to intervene.
After the arrest of Salah Hamouri in June, France asked for
"clarification"
of the reasons for his arrest and declared that it was doing everything possible to ensure that his situation was
"resolved as quickly as possible".
