(MENAFN- Qatar News Agency) alul Palestine April 20 - Residents of Palestinian village Maalul are celebrating Easter one day in the year Israeli authorities permit them to hold services in their local church a Ma'an news agency report said. On Saturday thousands of Palestinian Christians arrived Jerusalem for Holy Week festivities the report said. Israeli forces expelled ancestors of villagers from their homes in 1948. Currently hundreds of their descendants live in nearby Nazareth Yafa al Naseriyye and Haifa. Israelis prohibit residents from coming back to the village even though it is just a few kilometres away from their new homes. In 2003 more than 50 years after they fled their homes villagers returned to Maalul to celebrate Easter in the Catholic Church one of the few structures not demolished by the authorities. "We used to live here and we live close by now so we decided it was time to visit the sacred places of our village" Amin Jeraisy one of the organizers of the Easter celebrations told Ma'an. Israeli authorities have bulldozed the vast majority of the village's homes. The cleancut stones of their homes lie in haphazard piles across the gently rolling hill that once was home to 800 people the report said.
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