Arafat speech on the 4th of May

Confiscation of Jerusalem ID Cards

prepared by: Hadeel Wahdan

In 1996, Israel began implementing a new policy according to which only Palestinians who can document that they actually live within the municipal boundaries are entitled to the blue Jerusalem ID cards and Israeli State welfare services.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians, driven outside the city by Israeli policies, are in the process of losing their legal status as Jerusalemites. In May 1997, the Israeli Interior Ministry announced that it had confiscated 1,500 ID cards since early 1996. Since Oslo, Israel has confiscated ID cards from their Palestinian holders at a rate of 2-3 daily.

The Ministry released official figures pertaining to ID card confiscations between 1967 and 1996. According to the Ministry the figures are incomplete because:

Identification numbers issue to residents of East Jerusalem can no longer be distinguished from those given to inhabitants of West Jerusalem;
In the past, the decision to cancel a person's resident status in East Jerusalem was entered in the respective personal file, but not always in the computerized database. Identification of East Jerusalem residents whose resident status was discontinued by means of their addresses in the city proved inefficient because the Ministry's records of these addresses are only partial.

YEAR	CASES(CONFISCATED)
1995	91
1996	739
1997	1067
1998	788 (500 UNDER REVIEW)
1999	127
TOTAL	2812

The real number of victims of the Interior Ministry's policy during those three years - definitely much higher than the figure presented above - cannot be calculated from the Ministry's data.

Between January - August 1998, 788 ID cards were "found to have expired" with 500 cases still under investigation. Thus the number of Palestinian thus evicted from Jerusalem continues to rise steadily since the massive implementation of the Israeli policy in 1996; it reached 2812 cases (2812 families, i.e. roughly 8,200 individuals) by August 1998.

By December 1997, some 7,470 applications for family reunification are being studied by the Ministry."

According to the data released by the Israeli Interior Ministry in early October 1998, 788 Jerusalem identity cards have been confiscated from Palestinian Jerusalemites by the Ministry in the period January - August 1998. According to the Ministry’s spokeswoman Tova Elinson, 470 of these ID cards belonged to Palestinians living abroad. This rate of ID card confiscations is similar to the rate documented for 1997 and 1998.