I paid a judge to step down .. The Waqf land in Hebron was donated by the Palestinian Authority to the Russian Church

Al-Jazeera Net - Ramallah

The President of the Palestinian Supreme Court, Issa Abu Sharar, announced that he had stepped down from consideration of the case before him related to challenging a presidential decision to donate a plot of land in Hebron to the Russian Church Mission.

A brief statement of the so-called “Follow-up Committee on the Mobility of the Notables of the Al-Tamim Al-Dari” in Hebron stated that the president of the court stepped down from considering “the case of the Palestinian presidency and the cabinet violating the first endowment in Islam, giving it to the Russians and committing a crime by trampling on the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the disposition of the endowment land” .

Sheikh Kamel Mujahid (one of the notables of the Al-Tamimi family) told Al-Jazeera Net that Judge Abu Sharar sensed the embarrassment of being the one who had issued a previous decision to stop the disposal of waqf properties and announced his resignation, and to postpone the session until the 13th of next month.

For his part, legal expert Majed Al-Arouri said that what Abu Sharar did was a proper legal procedure, as the law provides for the removal of any judge who had a previous opinion on a case before him.

In his speech to Al-Jazeera Net, he made it clear that the judge can step aside on his own or ask one of the litigants to remove him from the case, as this procedure is one of the guarantees of a fair trial.

In conjunction with the Supreme Court session today, the Al-Tamimi family in Hebron organized a stand in front of the Supreme Court. As soon as Abu Sharar stepped down, voices of takbeer came out.

The Tamimi family had held several meetings on the land, and their anger intensified after it was stormed by settlers last month. The family fears that the church will sell it, especially since "the history of the Russian Church in the diversion of lands to Jews is a black history over a century", according to a previous statement by the family.

Earth story
The story of the land of “Jabal Sabti” west of Hebron dates back to October 5, 1871, when a lease (monopoly) was concluded for the Russian mission.

In 1960, the mission stopped paying the rent, and Al-Tamimi’s family resorted to the judiciary to regain the land, given that the church violated the most important clause of the lease contract, which is continuing to pay the annual rent according to the text of the law.

The case took a new ascending trend in 2009 when the Russian delegation submitted a request to the Land Authority to register the lands of “Jabal Sabti” surrounding the church in its name (73 dunums). The families of Hebron objected to this, and the case continued until the refusal of the registration transaction in 2016 because the Russian mission was not eligible to request it.

However, a new development took place in the file after the approval of the President of the National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, at the end of March 2016, of the decision of the Council of Ministers issued on February 27 of the same year, to own the plot of land for the benefit of the public treasury and for the benefit of the Russian mission to the Moscow / Jerusalem Patriarchate.

Those responsible for the waqf appealed to the Supreme Court of Justice to annul the expropriation decision, in violation of the explicit text of the law. The Supreme Court of Justice headed by Judge Abu Sharar issued a decision to suspend the expropriation decision until the case is decided.

According to a previous statement by Al-Tamimi family, the registration department implemented the instructions of the head of the authority and registered the piece in question on behalf of the Russian Mission to the Moscow / Jerusalem Patriarchate, according to Heba's treatment, in a procedure contrary to the Palestinian Basic Law and the Anti-Corruption Law.

The aforementioned land is approximately four kilometers to the west of the Ibrahimi Mosque in the city of Hebron, and the church denied in a declaration commented at its entrance that it sold or intended to sell it.