An update from our Lawyer Mr. Sani Khoury about the land case : The Nassar Family have filed a new petition to the Supreme Court requesting the registration of their land with new GPS coordinates. The petition is against the military authorities and the land registration authorities because they refuse to register the land of the Nassar family and at the same time continue to destroy the trees and property of the family. After a long legal battle in the Supreme Court the authorities agreed to register the Nassar Family land as private property using new GPS coordinates – effectively eliminating the declaration of the family land as State Land. In spite of this verdict of the Supreme Court the authorities have been dragging their feet with the process – therefore maintaining the current status of the Nassar Family land as State Land until this registration is completed -enabling the authorities to continue to try and claim the Nassar family is trespassing on State Land as they have been doing since the destruction of their trees. The Nassar Family bought 400 dunams of land and built its house on the location were the Tent of Nations exists today around 100 years ago. The family possesses the original purchase documents , maps and their ownership of the land was registered during the time of British Mandate in the early 1920s (something which is very rare in the West Bank as nearly all of the rural lands are unregistered). In 1991 the Israeli Authorities and within the context of trying to expand the settlement of Neve Daniel declared the great majority of 400 dunams of the Nassar family land as State Land. They only left the Nassar family home and the adjacent gardens out of this declaration. The declaration of land as State Land is the major legal mechanism by which land is taken from the Palestinians and given to the settlements. According to this mechanism, land which whose total cultivated area is less than 50 % or land which is not registered is declared as State Land which is land for public use – with the public meaning exclusively for Israeli settlers. The land of the Nassar Family is registered and they filed an appeal before a military tribunal (with the military tribunal being composed of an officer who is a settler). The Nassar family submitted its registration documents however the military court ruled that the Nassar family did not prove that the registration and ownership documents were related to their land !! The military tribunal tried to take advantage of the fact that the land was registered according to maps and borders before the advent of the GPS coordinates in order to rule that the Nassar family failed to prove that the land they owned corresponded to the ownership documents they possessed . This was because the land was registered according to the location of the four borders of the land and the military tribunal ruled that the family had only proved the location of three of the four borders and thus it was uncertain that this registration document corresponded to the actual land in possession of the Nassar family. This decision was appealed by the Nassar family to the Israeli Supreme Court. The Nassar family submitted a report by the president of the surveyors association in Israel which stated that all 4 borders are clearly designated in the registration document and that the decision of the military tribunal is baseless. More so however the Nassar family claimed in front of the court that is was preposterous to rule, as the military tribunal did, that the Nassar family purchased a plot of land totaling 400 dumans 100 years ago but somehow they built their house on and have been cultivating a different plot of land for all these years ! It was even more ridiculous to rule as the military tribunal did that the Nasser family have been living for 100 years on a plot of land other than the one they purchased but that coincidently three of the four borders were identical ! The military tribunal also completely ignored the original maps that existed. The Supreme Court found it hard to ignore the claims of the family however it did not cancel the declaration of the land as State Land; it forced the authorities to accept a compromise it suggested whereby the Nassar family would renew the registration of its land according to new GPS coordinates which effectively meant that the entire plot would be recognized as private land after re-registration. The Nassar family filed for the re-registration of its land according to the new GPS coordinates but the meantime the Land Registrar has been dragging its feet for years with this process without any explanation. Technically and until the land is re-registered the previous declaration of this private land as State Land still stands – something that seems to be the reason why the authorities are dragging their feet, however effectively the entire plot of land has been recognized as private. It is all private registered land and the fact that the authorities still regard parts of this land as public is only due to the fact that the illegal declaration of this private land as State Land - as declaration which was effectively cancelled by the Supreme Court technically continues to stand until the completion of the re-registration of the land – a re-registration that the authorities themselves have been dragging their feet with the process for years. In light of the above the Nassar family was left with no choice but to file another petition to the Israeli Supreme Court to force the military authorities to register its land. The Supreme Court has issued an injunction against the uprooting of any trees on the Nassar Family land and they have given the military authorities until 15.9.2014 to respond to the petition.
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 10:55:27 +0000
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