GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — The Hebron Rehabilitation Committee announced March 12 that it had won an Israeli Magistrates Court decision to evict settlers from the al-Bakri family's house in Tel Rumeida neighborhood in the Old City of Hebron.

This case, presented by the committee before Israeli courts in 2005, took the longest time ever to be settled, after a 14-year legal dispute across different Israeli courts. The importance of the case lies in the location of the house that is situated inside a closed military zone in the Old City.

Settlers have tended to seize Palestinian citizens’ houses coercively, with the support of the Israeli Civil Administration, and they take advantage of citizens leaving their houses due to harassment. The al-Bakri family, which resided in the three-story house in question, was forced to leave in 2000 due to ongoing harassment from the settlers who later moved into the house.

Israel controls 20% of Hebron, as per the 1997 Hebron Protocol. Since that year, Israeli authorities have imposed practices and policies in the area for what it said were security reasons, which include imposing curfew, turning the roofs of houses into military barricades, closing shops and installing checkpoints across town to limit the entry of citizens from outside. As a result, hundreds of Palestinians were displaced from their houses. The numbers of Palestinians in the Old City are estimated at 40,000, while settlers amount to 800 distributed over five settlement complexes.