Residency Rights: Geneva Convention

[art. 47] Protected persons who are in occupied territory shall not be deprived, in any case or in any manner whatsoever, of the benefits of the present Convention by any change introduced, as the result of the occupation of the territory, into the institutions or government of the said territory, nor by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the Occupying Power, nor by annexation by the latter of the whole or part of the occupied territory.

[art. 49] Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.
[Fourth Geneva Convention, 1949]

Israeli policy since 1967 has been to manufacture a Jewish East Jerusalem by reducing the Palestinian inhabitants to a managable and marginalized community and to then "unite" the city with its western sector. Bureaucratic policies have been implemented to expel and contain Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem in order to retain a demographic balance [imbalance, rather] between Jewish and Palestinian residents of Jerusalem to 73.5% and 26.6% respectively. What is happening in East Jerusalem today can be described, without any stretch of the imagination, as ethnic cleansing through bureaucratic means.

Revoking Residency Rights of Palestinian Jerusalemites Jerusalem ID's entitle the holder to live in Jerusalem, to Israeli medical insurance, social services and freedom of movement [see below]. The confiscation of Jerusalem ID's on a grand scale began in 1996 with the implementation of the "center of life" policy. Palestinians have always perceived Jerusalem to be their economic, social, religious, political and cultural capital - their center of life.

Now, they are being asked to prove this and to do so by Israeli standards. To renew a Jerusalem ID, or to register a newborn, a Palestinian must present records such as tax receipts, leases or property papers, utility bills, school certificates, and other such documents. They are sometimes required to show records for the past seven years. In other cases, they are required to prove they have lived in the city since birth. The fact that an ID had been issued and remains valid is not enough to prove residency. The examination process is stringent and based on unwritten criteria. All Palestinian-Jerusalemites living outside the municipal boundaries, whether in the West Bank or abroad, are liable to lose their ID's.