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OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)-- Lawyer Bassam Bahr, head of the Committee for Defending the Land and Resisting Settlement in Abu Dis, said that the Israeli Minister of Finance issued a decision to seize a hotel built over an area of 2900 m, under the pretext of "public interest and security purposes."

The occupation bulldozers began working in the hotel's land and the adjacent lands and uprooting the trees with the aim of completing the construction of separation wall in this region that separates the town of Abu Dis from occupied Jerusalem.

The hotel property is the only area where the separation wall that cuts off

Abu Dis from east-Jerusalem is not completed.

The lawyer Bahr stated that the decision was issued on January 29, 2013 and that the occupation military forces launched the work in the area without handing over to the residents an earlier notification of the move.

He said that the construction works on the wall has been suspended in this area since about ten years thanks to the hotel owners' efforts. However, the occupation forces have resorted to many, legal and illegal, methods to seize the hotel.

The last Israeli decision declared the owners of the hotel "absent", and transferred the property to the Custodian of Absentee Property. The hotel owners challenged the Israeli state in the Israeli court system asserting that they were very much present.

The case reached the Supreme Court of Justice in 2010. This was the first time this kind of cases reached the Supreme Court. The final hearing was scheduled April 9th, and recently postponed until May 21st 2013.

Sunday February 10th 2013 the state of Israel decided to not wait for the ruling and initiated the annexation of the property by building a wall around it, which shows that Israel does not even respect its own laws and courts.

The organization's lawyer pointed to the seriousness of the constructions in such area, over which the occupation intends to establish a settlement neighborhood, in an aim to create new facts on the ground in order to control the city of Jerusalem.