Palestinians appeal against delay in evacuation of illegal settlement

Palestinian landowners filed an appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court yesterday rejecting demands to postpone the evacuation of the illegal Israeli Amona outpost, according to a statement by Israeli human rights group Yesh Din.

Filed by Israeli lawyers Michael Sfard and Shlomi Zacharaa, the appeal implored the court not to respond to the demands of the Israeli State Attorney’s office, which requested the postponement on the basis that it could not arrange alternative housing for the residents of Amona before the target date of December this year.

The Amona outpost was slated for demolition following a 2008 Israeli Supreme Court decision after eight Palestinians from neighbouring villages – with the support of Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din – successfully petitioned the court to remove the outpost on grounds that the construction was carried out on privately owned Palestinian land.

After years of appeals from right-wing Israeli government officials and attempts by Amona settlers to prove they had legally purchased the land, an Israeli police investigation in May 2014 found the entirety of the outpost to have been built on private Palestinian lands and that the documents used by Amona residents to try claim their “purchases” were in fact forged.

In December 2014, the Israeli Supreme Court again ordered the outpost to be demolished by December 2016.

Sunday’s appeal claimed that continuing to postpone the evacuation of Amona would be “an unjustified violation of the rights of the Palestinian landowners, who have been waiting for their lands to be evacuated from Israeli settlers for two decades.”

The landowners named in the appeal said that the Israeli State Attorney’s demand was “political and aims to prevent the evacuation from taking place at all.”

They also objected to Israel’s plans to establish 98 housing units as a new settlement for Amona evacuees, to be located east of the already established settlement of Shiloh, on lands of the Palestinian village of Jalud in the northern West Bank district of Nablus.

There have been many attempted by political and settler groups to encourage the government to retrospectively legalise Amona’s construction.