On July 21, 2019,
HaMoked petitioned the Jerusalem Court for Administrative Affairs against the Ministry of Interior’s inexplicable and illegal failure to issue an identity card to a permanent resident Palestinian minor from East Jerusalem. This after repeated applications to the Ministry of Interior, submitted since October 2018, when the boy turned 16 – the compulsory threshold age for carrying an identity card – produced no result, despite the fact that abundant proof had been provided to the Ministry regarding the family’s center of life being in Jerusalem. In the petition, HaMoked raised the concern that extraneous considerations of vengeance were behind the Ministry of Interior’s conduct, given that the boy’s father, also a permanent resident of the city, had shot and killed two people and wounded several others in Jerusalem in 2016, before he was himself shot dead by the security forces. HaMoked stressed that if this concern was true, then the Ministry of Interior’s conduct was “contrary to one of the most basic principles of justice – the prohibition on punishing one person for the acts of another”.
Following the filing of the petition, the Ministry of Interior began handling the youth’s application and demanded – for the first time – additional documents as proof that the youth and his family maintain their center of life in the city. Once the family provided the documents, the Ministry of Interior even conducted an interview with the mother on the matter.
On December 3, 2019, the youth finally received an identity card.
