Jewish settlers who were evicted last February from the illegal West Bank outpost of Amona because it was established on privately owned land are now being moved to mobile homes on a land that was previously expropriated from individual Palestinian owners for public use.
According to Haaretz website the plot of land is situated near the West Bank settlement of Ofra.
However Haaretz has learned that no public buildings have ever been constructed on this land although it was seized by the Israeli authorities for public use.
Some of the trailer homes were installed several weeks before Amona was forcibly evacuated but Amona’s evacuees said then they would not live in them so work on installing the trailers there was halted at the time.
The evacuation of Amona last February the largest unauthorized Jewish outpost in the West Bank came after a prolonged legal and political fight. Israel’s high court of justice had ordered and delayed its evacuation several times.
Recently work on installing more than 10 trailers resumed at the site which is adjacent to the Givat Zvi neighborhood of Ofra north of Occupied Jerusalem.
Settlers said the trailers will later be relocated again to the settlement of Amihai which is being developed for the former Amona residents once infrastructure there is finished.
The Israeli army’s civil administration in the West Bank halted work at Givat Zvi after residents of Amona refused to relocate to the trailer homes there and visitors in recent months to the site which is only several hundred meters from where Amona stood found it empty and abandoned.
Infrastructure for four additional trailers had been put in place but the mobile homes themselves were never installed.
Now however the Mateh Binyamin regional council the local government in the area has resumed work on this seized Palestinian land and this week workmen were seen again at the site where several additional trailers have now been installed.
Maps belonging to the civil administration indicate that some of the trailers have indeed been placed on land that had been expropriated for public purposes but no public buildings have ever been built there.
In addition trailer homes that were installed there were placed without permits of any kind.
