Rochdale’s Labour parliamentary Candidate, Simon Danczuk, has joined Labour Friends of Palestine & the Middle East in condemning the eviction of Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah this week.

Armed Israeli police officers broke into houses at about 6am earlier this week while the families were sleeping before forcing them out with batons and arresting the international peace activists who were there in solidarity with the families.

“This is the ugly face of ethnic cleansing,” said Mr Danczuk. “I have been to East Jerusalem and seen the misery caused by the Israelis in terms of house demolitions and the general intimidation of Palestinian people there. This latest development is appalling and the Israeli’s actions cannot be justified.”

Mr Danczuk, who visited the West Bank just before the Israeli invasion late last year, said it was only right that the evictions had been strongly condemned by the British Consulate in Jerusalem as “unacceptable” and “incompatible with the Israeli professed desire for peace”.

He also supported calls by Labour MP Martin Linton, chair of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East, of which Mr Danczuk is a member, for the international community to maintain a united front against Israeli attempts to create new ‘facts on the ground’.

Martin Linton MP said: “It is illegal under international law for Israel to create Jewish settlements in Palestinian East Jerusalem and this is a particularly flagrant case of what the British Consulate described as ‘the imposition of extremist Jewish settlers into an ancient Arab neighbourhood’.

“It is part of the systematic ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem by Israelis who are trying to outnumber the Palestinian population – currently 268,000 to the Israelis’ 200,000 by a process of settlement and eviction. In the last few weeks the US State Department and the French Foreign Ministry have called in the Israeli ambassadors in Washington and Paris and warned them against building any new settlements in East Jerusalem.

“Now that the Israelis have ignored a specific request from President Obama to freeze settlement activity, it is clear that the international community must take tougher action that will impose a cost on Israel for their illegal actions.”