Alwaght- France on Sunday condemned Israeli regime's expulsion of French-Palestinian human rights lawyer Salah Hamouri, calling it "against the law".
Hamouri, a researcher with the Palestinian prisoners' rights NGO Addameer (Conscience), had been held in detention without trial since March, accused of a list of security offences.
In a statement on Sunday, regime's Interior Ministry said Hamouri "was deported this morning to France following Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked's decision to withdraw his residency status".
Many Palestinian residents of al-Quds's occupied eastern neighborhoods refuse Israeli citizenship and instead hold residency IDs issued by Israel's interior ministry. However, Tel Aviv can revoke the residency status, forcing Palestinians from their homes.
Family and allies were expecting the deportation to take place on an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to Paris.
Israeli regime has cited "breach of allegiance" to Israel as justification for Hamouri's deportation.
However, opponents of the deportation have pointed to the Fourth Geneva Convention which says that protected populations in an occupied territory, such as internationally recognized occupied East al-Quds, do not have a duty of allegiance to the occupying power.
France's foreign ministry criticized the expulsion in a press release on Sunday.
"France has also taken numerous steps with the Israeli authorities to express in the clearest possible way its opposition to this expulsion of a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem, an occupied territory within the meaning of the Fourth Geneva Convention," said the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.
"The Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs is in continuous contact with Mr Hamouri's family."
For his political activism, Hamouri has spent a total of eight years in Israeli prisons over different periods. In 2005, the apartheid regime sentenced him to seven years for an alleged plot by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to assassinate Ovadia Yosef, a right-wing rabbi, an accusation he denied.
In October 2021, Tel Aviv regime revoked his al-Quds residency, denying him the right to live in his hometown, which Zionists occupied in 1967 from Jordan.
