TIP–On Monday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced severe penalties for Arabs who sell land to Jews. The Times of Israel reports that the Wafa news agency, said that Abbas imposed a sentence of hard labor for life on “anyone diverting, renting or selling land to an enemy state or one of its subjects.”

Jordan’s penal code number 16 article 114, applicable in the Palestinian territories, previously subscribed “temporary hard labor” to perpetrators of the crime.

Abbas’ declaration came in response to the recent purchase of Palestinian homes in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. On Monday night, the Fatah Revolutionary Council “accused Palestinians who sold their Jerusalem Palestinian properties of ‘high treason,’ calling on the government and legal system to ‘take the necessary steps to deter them,’” according to the Times.

In 2010, the Associated Press reported that a Palestinian court determined that the death penalty should be imposed for any Palestinian guilty of selling land to Jews. Previously, it was at the the court’s discretion to choose between “life in prison or death.”

In May 1997, the Palestinian Authority’s justice minister, Freih Abu Meddein, stated that Palestinians selling land to Jews should be subject to the death penalty. In the subsequent weeks, at least four Arab suspected of doing so were murdered. In October 1997, the Palestinian Legislative Council passed a law declaring such sales to be “high treason,” though the law was never ratified by Yasser Arafat.