Bethlehem - Ma'an - An early-evening court appearance on Tuesday saw Israeli prosecutors deliver a statement declaring 21-year-old student Berlanty Azzam to have been illegally residing in the West Bank.
Berlanty, a fourth-year Business Administration student at Bethlehem University three credits shy of graduation, was seized from a minibus on her way back to Bethlehem from a job interview in Ramallah on 29 October. She was kept at an Israeli military checkpoint inside the West Bank for five hours, then blindfolded and transported to the Gaza Strip, where her family lives.
Lawyers from the Israeli human rights group Gisha were denied permission to visit Berlanty before she was forcibly removed from the West Bank and transferred into Gaza.
According to a spokesperson at Bethlehem University, the Israeli court set a hearing date of 12 November, which she called "good news" since a slow court process would make it unlikely for Berlanty to be able to travel back to Bethlehem to finish her degree.
The spokesperson said Israeli lawyers had indicated their intent to defend Berlanty's deportation as legal, since she did not have a permit to live in the West Bank.
Gisha, the firm defending Berlanty, said it would argue that the young woman left Gaza legally, with a permit to visit Jerusalem in 2005, and returned to a Palestinain area. They will argue that Israel has no jurisdiction to determine which Palestinian areas Palestinians can live and travel in. Their stance is that as a Palestinian Berlanty does not need a permit to live in Bethlehem, an area under Palestinian Authority control. Moreover, Berlanty did not need a permit to remain in the West Bank after entering, and no such kind of permit existed in 2005, so she couldn't have requested one.
