Hamouri, a lawyer and a field researcher with the Addameer Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Association, spent more than eight years in Israeli prisons, starting when he was abducted in 2001 and was sentenced to five months in prison. In 2004 he spent four months under arbitrary Administrative Detention orders without charges, then was abducted again in the year 2005 and was imprisoned for seven years, and then in the year 2017, he was abducted yet another time and spent 13 months under Administrative Detention orders, and upon his release, he received an order barring him from entering the rest of the West Bank for two years.

On June 6, 2022, Salah received another three-month Administrative Detention order just hours before his scheduled release after being imprisoned for three months under a similar order. The decision to revoke his residency was made in October of last year, 2021, after accusing him of “breeching loyalty to the state” for his human rights and legal work in defending Palestinian political prisoners.

Hamouri was born to a Palestinian father from Jerusalem where he grew up and lived, and his mother is a French national. Several years earlier, Israel deported his French wife, Elsa Lefort, to her country after detaining her at the airport in Tel Aviv for three days when she returned to Jerusalem. The lawyer and his wife have two children.

Palestinians born in occupied Jerusalem are only granted “residency status” and not citizenship of Israel despite Israel’s constant claims of “unified Jerusalem as its capital.”