On April 16, 2015, HaMoked filed an
amended petition to the High Court of Justice (HCJ) against the Minister of Interior's decision to deport from Israel the widow of one of the assailants in the Har Nof attack, who is the mother of three small children who are Israeli residents. The woman, originally a resident of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), had been undergoing family unification in Israel since 2009.
The amended petition was prompted by the state's response to the original petition whereby the Minister of Interior was clinging to his decision to deport the woman. HaMoked asserted that the minister's decision was arbitrary and discriminatory, motivated by extraneous consideration, founded on partial facts, and, moreover, violated both the principle of the child's best interests and the right to family life. HaMoked also challenged the minister's determination that the children's status in Israel would not be harmed, and recalled that shortly after the minister's intention to deport the family had been published, the National Insurance Institute (NII) had hastened to revoke the children's entitlement health insurence and social-security benefits, and retracted its decision only following
HaMoked's intervention.
In addition to the amended petition, HaMoked also filed an urgent request for an interim order to instruct the state not to deport the woman from Israel pending conclusion of the proceedings in her case. This, in order to prevent her separation from her three small children, or alternatively, the deportation of the children to the OPT along with their mother, until full exhaustion of her rights in court.
In May 28, 2015,
the state responded that the Minister of Interior's decision to deport the woman was reasonable and did not warrant any court intervention. The state denied HaMoked's contentions concerning flaws in the decision making process, and contended that the minister had considered the question of an exceptional humanitarian reason warranting that the woman remain in Israel; upon finding no such reason, the minister had decided to have the woman deported. The state also stressed the absence of any security preclusion for the woman's continued presence in Israel, did not necessarily mean that the minister's decision had been based on extraneous considerations.
On May 31, 2015, in an exceptional and outrageous step,
the court decided to reject HaMoked's interim order request, and ordered that the hearing on the petition be held no later than October 29, 2015(!). Upon issuance of the decision, the temporary injunction of November 30, 2015, prohibiting the woman's deportation from Israel, became invalid.
On June 1, 2015,
HaMoked requested that the court revisit its decision and
schedule a prompt hearing on the request for an interim order. Alternatively, HaMoked requested that the court order an urgent hearing on the petition itself.
HaMoked reasserted that deporting the woman from Israel before the court's final decision in her case would cause grave harm to the innocent woman, and certainly her innocent children. Moreover, if, ultimately, the petition is accepted, the harm to the children, forced to leave their life-long home together with their mother, would be enormous and indelible. Additionally, it would impinge on their social security rights, including the right to health insurance.
