Israel deports Palestinian lawyer allegedly involved in terror activities to France
Israel on Sunday announced it has deported a Palestinian lawyer to France, saying Salah Hamouri was still active in a terror group years after he was released from jail for a plot to kill a prominent rabbi.
Hamouri, who holds French citizenship, was held since March in administrative detention –- an Israeli tool that allows authorities to hold suspects without charge for months at a time and without allowing them to see the evidence against them. He has denied all the allegations against him.
Hamouri is alleged to be involved in terror activities but has not been charged or convicted in the latest proceedings against him. In addition, Israel stripped him of his Jerusalem residency.
Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, announcing the deportation, praised it as a “tremendous achievement” at the end of her tenure.
“The sentence for the terrorist Salah Hamouri has been completed and he has been deported from Israel,” Shaked said in a statement.
“This was a long and protracted process and it is a tremendous achievement that I was able to bring about his deportation just before the end of my duties, using the tools at my disposal to advance the fight against terrorism. I hope that the incoming government will continue along these lines and deport terrorists from Israel,” Shaked said.
Expected incoming interior minister Aryeh Deri, head of the Shas party, said the deportation “marked the end of a long but just legal process.”
There was no public comment from France on the matter.
Israeli human rights group HaMoked decried the decision, saying that “deporting a Palestinian from their homeland for breach of allegiance to the state of Israel is a dangerous precedent and a gross violation of basic rights.”
The Supreme Court cleared the way for the deportation after rejecting an appeal from HaMoked earlier this year.
Israel says that Hamouri is a member of the PFLP, labeled a terror organization by Israel and the United States.
He has worked as a lawyer for Adameer, a rights group that assists Palestinian prisoners, which was blacklisted by Israel for alleged ties to the PFLP.
He spent seven years in prison after being convicted in a 2005 plot to kill Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, then a former chief rabbi and the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party.
Hamouri was freed in the 2011 prisoner swap with the Gaza-based Hamas terrorist group for the release of captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.
Israel said since then, Hamouri has used his Jerusalem residency to continue “his hostile, serious and significant activity.”
The decision to revoke his residency underscored the fragile status of Jerusalem’s Palestinians, who hold revocable Israeli residency rights but are largely not citizens.
It also threatened to trigger a diplomatic spat with France, which has argued against the deportation. French President Emmanuel Macron has previously raised concerns about the case with Prime Minister Yair Lapid.
Last year, Hamouri was among six human rights activists whose mobile phones were found by independent security researchers to have been infected with spyware made by the Israeli company NSO Group.
It was not known who placed the spyware on the phones. Israel says there’s no connection between the terror designation of Adameer and five other Palestinian rights groups and any alleged use of NSO spyware. Israel has provided little evidence publicly to support the terrorism designation, which Palestinian groups say is meant to muzzle them and dry up their sources of funding.
Israel captured East Jerusalem, home to the city’s most important religious sites, in the 1967 Six Day War and annexed the area in a move that is not internationally recognized. It considers the entire city to be its capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.
While Jews in the city are entitled to automatic citizenship, Palestinians are granted residency status. This allows them freedom of movement, the ability to work and access to Israeli social services, but they are not allowed to vote in national elections. Residency rights can be stripped if a Palestinian is found to live outside the city for an extended period or in certain security cases.
Palestinians can apply for citizenship. But few do, not wanting to be seen as accepting what they see as an occupation. Those who do apply, however, face a lengthy and bureaucratic process.
The Haaretz daily reported this year that fewer than 20,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem, some 5% of the population, hold Israeli citizenship, and that just 34% of applications are approved. It cited information from the Interior Ministry delivered by Shaked to a parliamentary inquiry.