French-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri, expelled from Israel to France on 18 Dec 2022. (Credit: CABBAS MOMANI / AFP)
UN investigators will examine the criminal responsibility of those — including the Israeli company El Al — involved in the late-2022 expulsion of French-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri, the UN has described as a “war crime.”
Salah Hamouri, 38, has denied Israeli accusations of links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which the Zionist state and the European Union consider a terrorist organization.
France, where Hamouri has been living since December, considers Israel’s expulsion of the human rights lawyer after the revocation of his residency permit in occupied East Jerusalem to be unlawful.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has described his expulsion as a “war crime,” but a UN commission set up in 2021 by the Human Rights Council to investigate the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has looked into the matter at greater length.
In a report published Thursday, it confirms that this is “a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”
“There is no doubt that the revocation of Salah Hamouri’s residency permit in East Jerusalem, based on an alleged ‘lack of allegiance’ to the State of Israel, constitutes a war crime,” said Chris Sidoti, a member of the commission, in a press release.
Airline
The commission intends to examine “the criminal responsibility of all those involved” in his expulsion and has begun to draw up a “list” of those who could be held criminally responsible.
“We have retained information on those who bear responsibility for what could amount to the war crime of illegal expulsion,” Sidoti explained, “including third parties such as the airlines and their staff involved in the expulsion.”
The report points in particular to the national airline El Al.
Arrested and imprisoned without charge in 2005, Hamouri was sentenced in 2008 to seven years’ imprisonment by an Israeli court that found him guilty of participating in a plot to assassinate Ovadia Yossef, the former chief rabbi of Israel and founder of the ultra-Orthodox Shass party. The Franco-Palestinian, who maintains his innocence, was released in 2011 as part of a prisoner exchange that led to the release of the French-Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Now a lawyer, he worked for the NGO Addammeer, which defends Palestinian prisoners. But this NGO is among those placed on Israel’s list of terrorist organisations.
‘Silencing’
In this respect, the UN commission accuses the Israeli government more broadly of increasingly reducing civic space by using a “strategy of delegitimising and silencing civil society.”
This strategy, says the report, includes criminalising Palestinian civil society organisations and their members by labelling them “terrorists.”
The investigators, who conducted 127 interviews including with victims and witnesses, accuse the authorities in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories of violating the rights of civil society. But, in their view, the Israeli authorities are responsible for the majority of these violations.
“We have been particularly alarmed by the situation of Palestinian human rights defenders, who are regularly subjected to a series of punitive measures under the occupation regime,” said Navi Pillay, President of the Commission, in the press release.
For the Israeli authorities, “many of the false accusations made in the report are not new.”
“Israel has a robust and independent civil society made up of thousands of NGOs, human rights defenders and national and international media,” they said in a statement sent to AFP.