Report: 16 PalArabs in prison for selling land to Jews

From Aaron Klein:

At least 16 Palestinians are currently in Palestinian Authority prisons for selling property to Jews, KleinOnline has learned.

Nine of the 16 face possible capital punishment for their direct involvement in the land sales, according to PA sources.

The sources said that of the 16 Palestinians incarcerated, seven are employees of the PA, including its security forces.

Most of those in prison are housed in PA jails in Hebron, Jericho and Ramallah. The land sales to Jews include four deals in the region of Hebron, 3 in Jerusalem and one more deal in the West Bank city of Beit El.

The PA sources told KleinOnline that the Palestinian government recently formed a unit with a $2.7 million yearly budget to investigate property sales to Jews as well as any Jewish communities, outposts or military bases that may be sitting on Arab-owned land.

The unit works with nongovernmental organizations, including European-funded NGOs.
The number of Palestinians imprisoned for land sales to Jews is much larger than previous reported.

It is hard to verify stories like these, but Klein definitely has contacts in the PA. It is possible that they use him for their own vendettas, but he isn't making them up.

What we do know:

• It is a crime in the PA to sell land to Jews, and one can be executed for that.
• Plenty of Jews will do everything they can to purchase land in the territories, and they will go through elaborate schemes to legally buy the land.
• Arabs have happily, and sometimes anxiously, sold land to Jews since modern Zionism started.
• The Jews who claim to have purchased land in recent decades are not all liars.

Putting it together, it makes the article quite plausible.

Where's Amnesty International? They mentioned the death penalty for selling land to Jews in 1997 and 2001, but their outrage wasn't because the crime is racist - it was because they are against the death penalty altogether.

I could not find anything at HRW about this at all.

Presuambly, life in prison for selling land to Jews is fine, according to the leading human rights organizations.

(h/t Lori)