Human rights defender and lawyer Salah Hammouri was deported from his homeland on December 18, after the Israeli government revoked his Jerusalem residency under the Israeli “breach of loyalty” law.

Palestinian human rights lawyer Salah Hammouri, who is currently imprisoned by Israel, has been ordered by the Israeli state to be deported on December 4th, following the revocation of his Jerusalem residency status. 

Rights groups and activists have expressed fears that Hammouri’s deportation will set a dangerous precedent for other Palestinians in the city, who could be forced out of their homes if found to be in “breach of loyalty” to the apartheid state.

UN Special Rapporteur Mary Lawlor calls Israeli attacks on Palestinian human rights organizations an “atrocity.” “It’s as simple as that,” Lawlor tells Mondoweiss, “Israel does not want human rights defenders documenting and publicizing the attacks and injustice done to the Palestinians. So, this is their tactic.”

Palestinian political prisoner Salah Hammouri writes from Ofer prison, “I know that the love of a homeland is an unrequited love, bringing only hurt, pain, and loss. It has robbed me of the most beautiful years of my life and stolen from me my adolescence and youth. It forced me to grow up quickly, living always beyond my years. Yet I love my homeland still, knowing that even if we do everything we can for it, our country will still only ask “what more can you give?”

It is a zero-sum-equation in the calculations of most people, and I understand this. But for me (my preference), a real life is not waiting at the station for the train of freedom to arrive, but being on the train itself, no matter the sacrifice.”

Lawyer and researcher Salah Hammouri appeals to French president Emmanuel Macron from inside Israel’s prisons: “Mr. President, what is the reason behind your double standard in the treatment of people living under oppression?”

In the years I’ve been covering Israel’s occupation of Palestine, it’s an issue that arises time and time again. Palestinians are criminalized and imprisoned, and their lives destroyed all because of a weapon that Israel can yield, without any question or consequence: secret evidence.

In a new submission to the International Criminal Court, jailed Palestinian human rights lawyer Salah Hammouri called on the court to bring urgency to its investigation of war crimes committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory. 

Mass incarceration has defined Israel’s colonial project. Since 1967, over 850,000 Palestinians have been arrested and imprisoned by the Israeli regime. Currently there are 4,450 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, including hundreds of administrative detainees being held without charge or trial. But just as mass incarceration remains a defining feature of the Israeli occupation, so too has prisoner resistance. Currently, an ongoing boycott of the Israeli judicial system by all 530 Palestinian administrative detainees has surpassed 100 days.

Salah Hammouri is a Palestinian-French lawyer and human rights advocate from Jerusalem who works with the prisoner’s rights organziation Addameer, which was designated as a ‘terrorist organization’ by Israel. Here, Hammouri describes the arrests and imprisonments he has experiences since he was a teenager, and Israel’s motives in the attacks today against him and other human rights defenders. “The state harassment against Palestinian organizations, my fellow human rights defenders and myself is only the continuation of policies by a regime that seeks to quash our people’s will for freedom at all costs, as well as any resistance to the colonial apartheid regime put in place since 1948, which has pushed colonization relentlessly ever since.” Hammouri writes.

Six Palestinian human rights activists were targeted by spyware from the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, a new report revealed on Monday, in the first reported instance of Palestinian activists being targeted by the surveillance company. The six activists are all members of the six Palestinian civil society organizations recently branded “terrorist organizations” by Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz.