The Supreme Planning Administration of the Civil Administration approved today the establishment of temporary homes for evacuees of the Nativ Ha'avot neighborhood of Gush Etzion.
Security forces have been preparing to demolish the buildings in Nativ Ha'avot following a Supreme Court decision in December 2016 ordering the destruction of the neighborhood in Elazar after a disputed strip of land was found to run through it.
"We welcome the approval of the temporary solution," the residents of the neighborhood said, adding that "the solution just approved is a temporary humanitarian response for the residents until Nativ Ha'avot is approved and the urban building plan approved, permitting the construction hundreds of new housing units."
The residents added, "Unfortunately, this approval comes too late for residents of Nativ Ha'avot whose homes are slated to be demolished in another three weeks, and the residents will find themselves with no arrangement and without a roof over their heads until the completion of this arrangement, just like the residents of Amona."
"The time has come for the Israeli government to take its residents seriously," said a statement from Nativ Ha'avot.
Yesterday 50 leading rabbis from the religious Zionist community called on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu not to destroy the Nativ Ha'avot neighborhood.
The rabbis demand in their call to Netanyahu that he keep his promise "and immediately normalize the status of the land and the 15 houses in the Nativ Ha'avot neighborhood in Elazar, and approve the construction plan for 300 housing units on state land in the heart of Gush Etzion, thus enabling continued momentum of the welcome construction in Judea and Samaria."
"In any other place in the country, apart from Judea and Samaria, other arrangements are made in similar situations, not house demolitions. The legal experts of the State of Israel believe that such arrangements should be reached in those cases and that the buildings should not be demolished. This destruction could be the opening of a much larger wave of destruction of thousands of apartments throughout the Land of Israel," the rabbis added.
The letter is signed by Rabbi Chaim Druckman, Rabbi Yaakov Ariel, Rabbi Aryeh Stern, Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Avigdor Neventzal, the Rabbi of Shoham David Stav, Rabbi of Tzfat Shmuel Eliyahu and Rabbi Yaakov Medan.