Turkey hands Palestinians Ottoman land archive

Nablusi’s shop on Al-Saraya street hosts hundreds of artefacts that reveal Palestine’s past, such as passports, accounting books, government documents, or even Ottoman-era cigarettes

The Turkish government has handed over electronic copies of the deeds of Palestinian lands from the Othman archive, Palestinian media reported today, noting that this would help Palestinians counter illegal Israeli settlement.

According to Quds Net News, the archives consist of 36,000 pages which include details about the ownership of the Palestinian land during the five-century Ottoman rule of Palestine.

The registers are kept by the Palestinian Heritage and Islamic Research Organisation (Mithaq) in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Abu Dis.

Israeli occupation forces have stolen wide swathes of Palestinian lands to build illegal settlements which host nearly 500,000 settlers in the occupied West Bank and 220,000 in the occupied Jerusalem.

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