GAZA CITY, May 7 (IslamOnline.net) - Palestinian deportees from the West Bank city of Bethlehem reiterated calls for returning home one year after the deal to end five-week Israeli siege of Church of Nativity pushed them into exile in 2002.

“The International community should move to alleviate our suffering by allowing us back to our families in Bethlehem,” Hatem Hammud read a statement on behalf of deportees in a press conference here on Wednesday, May 7.

Mahmud called during a press conference on all Islamic and national group members to join up a demonstration to be staged Saturday, May 10, by deportees for urging the Red Cross to take action.

“We express our rejection to the deportation which is nothing but a crime against human rights which requires the intervention of the world community and the application of international legitimacy laws,” said Kayed al-Ghul, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of resistance groups that came into existence to force Israel to end long-standing occupation of Palestinian areas.

The deportation was part of a deal worked out with the United States and European Union to end Israel's five-week siege of the church and tightened security measures imposed on the holy city earlier in May 2002.

Under the arrangement, the more than 120 people holed up in the church were allowed to leave, with 26 Palestinians being banished to Gaza and the 13 others sent into exile to European countries. In return, Israel was to withdraw its troops from the biblical town, whose residents had been under curfew since April 2 of the same year.

But the deportation drew criticism from many Palestinians, who felt the deportees were punished only for resisting Israeli continued aggressions against Palestinian-ruled areas.

“It is a slap in the face of history. Israel is a lawless state and should be as excluded as cruelly punished,” said PFLP’s al-Ghul.

Israel now celebrates the 55^{th anniversary of its creation on Arab land it occupied in 1948 after the war against Arabs.}

But Palestinians mark their Naqba, or catastrophe, commemorating the loss of lands and forced expulsion when Israel was established. Millions of Palestinians now live in refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries such as Jordan, Syria and Lebanon since 1948. The Jewish state refused their return to homeland.

For Palestinian legalists, the deportation of Palestinians is a clear “criminal act.”

“It is a crime under the International Law… It is a war crime, in fact, as described by legal experts,” said Abdel-Rahman Abu Nasr, head of the Palestinian Lawyers’ Syndicate

“The deportation is a clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention that governs the relation between the occupying force and occupied areas,” he said.

The speakers at the conference took up the chance to call on the new Palestinian cabinet under Mamoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) to raise the issue of Palestinian deportees and detainees in Israeli jails.