Daoud al-Ghoul, Majd Darwish, and Saleh Dirbas, three young Palestinian Jerusalemites, have been deported by the Israeli occupation from their home city of Jerusalem for five months, beginning on 30 November 2014 and ending 30 April 2015. Ghoul, 31, Darwish, 24, and Dirbas, 23, are all former political prisoners, and face imprisonment if any of them violate the order against visiting the city of their birth and their homes. No reason has been given for this arbitrary and unjust order.

The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits individual or collective transfer of persons under occupation from one area of occupied territory to another. This forced expulsion comes following the stripping of Jerusalem ID’s of elected Palestinian Legislative Council members Mohammad Abu Tir, Ahmad Atoun, Mohammed Totah and Khaled Abu Arafah; as well as the stripping of the Jerusalem residency of Nadia Abu Jamal, the widow of Ghassan Abu Jamal. This comes also shortly following the statement of occupation prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it plans to seek powers to strip Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship and Palestinians with Jerusalem ID of their citizenship and residency rights if they or their relatives participate in resistance to the occupation.

It is clearly part of the ongoing Nakba directed against the Palestinian people from 1947 until today, and the systematic expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians at the hands of the occupying power. In particular, Palestinians in Jerusalem are being targeted for ethnic cleansing, expulsion and removal through home demolitions, settler violence and invasions, stripping of residency rights, mass arrests and imprisonment, and land confiscation in a clear bid to erase and negate the Palestinian character of the city and its place as the capital of the Palestinian people.

We call on the Canadian government to put pressure on Israel to not only lift the deporation orders of the three activists but to also halt Israel's practice of displacing Palestinians in Jerusalem.