International human rights groups published a joint letter on Monday, March 28, appealing the United Nations to address the administrative detention of Palestinian-French human rights activist Salah Hammouri by Israel. The groups also called upon Israel to immediately release Hammouri from administrative detention and stop the ongoing harassment and persecution against him. 36-year-old Hammouri is a well-known human rights activist, lawyer and member of the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. He is a former political prisoner and has spent over 10 years in Israeli prisons for his resistance and political activities against the occupation.
The signatories to the letter include the Association France Palestine Solidarite, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Palestinian Human Rights Council, Al-Haq and the Platform of French NGOs for Palestine. In their letter, the groups state that “Salah Hammouri’s case highlights the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime’s widespread and systematic practice of illegal population transfer and demographic manipulation, as manifested through laws, policies, and practices, to maintain their institutionalized regime of racial domination and oppression over the Palestinian people.” It adds that “his case was highlighted in Amnesty International’s landmark report demonstrating Israel’s crimes of apartheid, specifically the illegal practice of forcible population transfer, deportations, and demographic engineering.”
Hammouri was arrested on March 7 by the Israeli security forces early in the morning at around 4-5 am. Around 25 security forces personnel, including the Musta’ribeen special unit forces, broke into his home in Kufr Aqab, north of Jerusalem and violently arrested him. They also conducted a search of the house and confiscated several of his electronic devices. Hammouri suffered injuries to his wrists as he was tied up using a plastic zip-tie and made to kneel on the floor before being forcibly arrested. He was then taken to Ofer military base and later to the Mascobbiya interrogation center in West Jerusalem. Two days after his arrest, an Israeli military judge extended Hammouri’s detention, followed by a three-month administrative detention order based on ‘secret evidence’.
Hammouri was reportedly in the middle of an appeal against a recent decision by the Israeli interior ministry to revoke his permanent residency status in Jerusalem. This was described by rights groups as “profound violations of international law that puts him at imminent risk of forced deportation, amounting to grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, the war crime of forced population transfer, and crimes against humanity of displacement, and apartheid.” The letter urged the UN special procedures to “urgently address the arbitrary arrest and continued punitive residency revocation of Salah Hammouri as it represents a step towards the wider application against HRDs, peaceful dissent, and Palestinians of Jerusalem more generally to achieve demographic goals.”
Calling the revocation of Hammouri’s residency status a war crime and a crime against humanity as per the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the groups called on Israel to repeal its racist and discriminatory Entry into Israel Law (1952), used to target and persecute Palestinians and human rights activists. The law violates their basic fundamental rights, including the right to freedom of movement and residence and the right to leave their country and return.
The letter highlights several other ways in which Israel perpetuates human rights abuses and violations against Palestinians, rights activists, and members of the civil society, such as arbitrary detention, torture and other ill-treatment, institutionalized hate speech and incitement, residency revocation, deportations, and surveillance and calls on the UN to investigate these violations.
