Israel has deported a Palestinian-French human rights lawyer after accusing him of security threats.
Salah Hammouri, 37, was escorted onto a flight to France by police early on Sunday morning, according to Israel’s interior ministry.
A lifelong resident of Jerusalem, he was stripped of his residency rights after officials accused him of being a member of a terrorist organisation, a BBC report said.
Sunday, 18 December – The Israeli settler-colonial authorities unlawfully deported French-Palestinian lawyer and human rights defender Salah Hammouri from his hometown, Jerusalem, to France for “breach of allegiance” to the occupying state.#justiceforsalah #libérezsalah pic.twitter.com/RKTmh5hv9U
— JusticeforSalah (@JusticeforSalah) December 18, 2022
The Times of Israel reported that Salah Hammouri was still active in a terror group years after he was released from jail for a plot to kill a prominent rabbi.
Hammouri, who holds French citizenship, had been held since March in administrative detention –- an Israeli tool that allows authorities to hold suspects for months at a time without charging them and without allowing them to see the evidence against them. He has denied all the allegations against him, the report said.
Hammouri, who has lived in Jerusalem his entire life, has been held on suspicion of participation in terror activities due to his affiliation with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror group, but has not been charged or convicted in the latest proceedings against him.
He works for the Palestinian human rights organization Addameer, which was deemed by Israel in October 2021 to be a terror organization, together with several other NGOs — a designation Addameer along with the UN and several Israeli human rights groups have all strongly rejected.
Hammouri has denied the charges against him. The rights groups have condemned the move to deport him.
According to The Guardian, a statement from the Hammouri campaign called the deportation a “war crime” and said it constituted a breach of international law.
“Wherever a Palestinian goes, he takes with him these principles and the cause of his people: his homeland carried with him to wherever he ends up,” Hammouri said in a statement.
The French foreign ministry also expressed disappointment at the decision, and said it condemned “the Israeli authorities’ decision, against the law, to expel Salah Hammouri to France”.