Thousands of Jerusalem children denied basic services by Israeli apartheid

Thousands of Jerusalem children denied basic services by Israeli apartheid
JERUSALEM (Electronic Intifada) 30 Dec by Patrick O. Strickland — In Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, thousands of Palestinian children born to parents who hold different types of identity cards often live their entire youth unregistered and without any form of citizenship or identity documents. “It’s very hard … we walk around paranoid all the time,” said Fidaa Shweiki, whose four children are unregistered. “Because Israel has not allowed me to register the children, it has caused us a lot of problems in many areas of our lives.” The Civic Coalition for Jerusalem has estimated that around 10,000 Palestinian children in East Jerusalem are unregistered (“Jerusalem: General facts and statistics” [PDF]). Considered stateless under international law, Palestinian residents of Jerusalem hold a special Israeli-issued identity card, as well as Jordanian travel documents.
Shweiki comes from the al-Thuri area of Jerusalem, where her children — two boys and two girls aged between 18 months and nine years — were born in a local hospital. The children have no identity documents other than a slip of paper acknowledging that they were born in Jerusalem. The document is not a birth certificate and does not include an identification number. Shweiki’s late husband Anwar Khalil Abed Rabbo was from the town of Yatta in the occupied West Bank and held identification documents issued by the Palestinian Authority.  Abed Rabbo, just 27 years old at the time, was with another Palestinian man when both were shot and killed by an Israeli truck driver in al-Samu‘, a village near Hebron, in 2012. The Israeli military claimed that the two were trying to rob the driver. Yet Shweiki insisted that Abed Rabbo was on his way to join her in Jerusalem for the birth of their youngest child that same day. Because Israel continuously denied him entry permits to visit his wife, he used to sneak into Jerusalem.
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