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Jewish settlers take over east Jerusalem home

JERUSALEM — Israeli settlers and police evicted a Palestinian family from their home in annexed east Jerusalem on Tuesday, after the house was sold to the settlers, activists and the family said.

The eviction began early in the day when police removed about 15 members of the Kara’in family from their home in Jabal Mukaber, an Arab neighbourhood just south of Jerusalem’s Old City, an Israeli activist said.

“There are about 100 police here and the whole area is completely closed off,” said Assaf Sharon, an activist with the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, an Israeli-Palestinian group which fights to stop settlers from taking over Arab homes in east Jerusalem.

“In effect, they are building a new settlement in east Jerusalem,” he told AFP.

Faadi Kara’in, 21, told AFP his uncle had sold the three-storey property for 450,000 dollars (333,000 euros), but the family had been trying to fight the sale in court.

“We lost,” he said. “In court, they said they had paid half of the money to my uncle Ali, and they wanted to pay the rest to us, but we refused.”

Ali Kara’in died three months ago of a heart attack, he said.

Sharon said the Kara’in family had been locked in a legal battle over the property with the right-wing Elad movement, which pushes Jewish settlement in mainly Arab east Jerusalem.

“We saw people from Elad inside the house coordinating things. They seemed heavily involved.”

But a spokesman for Elad denied the group had acquired the house, telling AFP it had been purchased by a Jerusalem-based lawyer acting on behalf of a US property group, Wohl Investment Co.

The lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Palestinians regard east Jerusalem as the capital of their promised state and fiercely oppose any attempts to extend Israeli control over it.

Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the rest of the world. The Jewish state considers the whole of Jerusalem its “eternal and indivisible” capital.