Salah Hamouri is a French-Palestinian human rights lawyer who has been persecuted by the Israeli authorities for most of his life and has been repeatedly placed under a regime of administrative detention. The Justice For Salah campaign is a coordinated effort by various Palestinian and international human rights organisations to end his persecution.
Besides being subjected to Israel’s infamous system of arbitrary administrative detention, he has also faced travel bans, phone tapping, and other violent transgressions. Hamouri is currently imprisoned without charge or trial.
To compound the ordeal, Hamouri’s lawyers are barred from seeing any supposed evidence used to detain him. Hamouri has been banned from seeing his wife or children, and he risks being deported from Jerusalem.
The persecution of Salah Hamouri is noted to be part of a draconian effort by the Israeli regime to clamp down on resistance and dissent. Since 2020, Hamouri’s permanent resident status has been under threat of revocation. Based on ‘secret evidence’, Hamouri’s “breach of allegiance” to the State of Israel has been cited as the grounds of this forcible transfer.
If deported, his case could set a precedent that allows Israel to expel several other Palestinian Jerusalemites from their land. The Justice for Salah campaign is a matter of resistance – not only against the persecution of one individual, but against the forced deportation of any Palestinian resident of Jerusalem. This is something which Salah has fought against his entire life.