Another battle in Naqoura… over the commons

Nour Yazbek wrote in “Al-Akhbar”:

Despite being subjected to daily Israeli attacks for seven months, Naqoura finally celebrated its victory in the battle to restore its commons. On March 28, the head of the Cases Authority at the Ministry of Justice, Judge Helena Iskandar, issued a decision ordering the Naqoura municipality to seize 1,200 dunums of commons, “which the former mayor, Jawad Taher, had registered in his name,” according to the lawsuit filed by the municipality. The decision ends a long legal process that began 24 years ago when the Naqoura municipality filed a complaint against Taher on charges of falsifying real estate records and registering the three properties in his name.

The area of ​​public real estate in Naqoura is about 1,800 dunums, constituting about 4% of the town’s area. Mayor Abbas Awada said that Taher “took possession of 1,216 dunams of these properties, or about two-thirds of them, and registered them in his name in 1984, taking advantage of a fire that consumed the warehouse of the Land Registry Secretariat in Sidon in 1976 and led to the destruction of the files, so that he could re-survey the properties and register them in his name, after the “With knowledge and information from one of the previous mukhtars stating that the three properties had not been previously surveyed.”

Awada confirmed that “real estate was voluntarily surveyed in 1950 as public property (commons), and the voluntary survey is done only once.”