Israeli occupants of illegal West Bank outpost agree to relocate

A group of hardline Jewish settlers, who have been living in an unauthorised West Bank outpost, say they have accepted an Israeli government proposal to evacuate the site, apparently ending the potential for a violent confrontation, the Guardian newspaper has reported.

The 40 or so families who live in the rough-and-ready hilltop outpost of Amona, built illegally on private Palestinian land, have reportedly been at the centre of a years-long court battle.

However, after night-long negotiations with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including the far-right leader of the Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennett, the Amona settlers said on Sunday they accepted Israel’s promise to build 52 homes and public buildings for them at a nearby location.

“We made great efforts to reach a solution for Amona,” Netanyahu said after the meetings.

“We did it out of our goodwill and out of love for settlement. The Amona leaders with whom we met overnight can attest that we have done all that we could. I can only hope that the residents of Amona who are now discussing the proposal will accept it. It would be the right thing to do.”

The settlers agreed to increase the number of mobile homes that would be placed at a new site in Amona, on what Israel describes as land it holds in custodianship for absentee Palestinian owners. Settlers accepted the deal at a vote in Amona’s synagogue on Sunday.

But the “absentee” status can be challenged in court if a property owner comes forward, according to the Guardian. An Israeli anti-settlement group said on Sunday it had located a Palestinian owner who would bring legal action.

Amona has recently turned into a symbol for the wider settlement movement, prompting highly controversial legislation in the Israeli Knesset to retroactively legalise dozens of other similar outposts.

That law – which does not include Amona – still needs to win two more parliamentary votes to pass and ultimately could be overturned by the Supreme Court, where it is expected to face legal challenges by settlement opponents.

The fate of Amona has exerted an outsized influence in Israeli politics in recent months, exposing deep splits within the rightwing coalition government of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has appeared desperate to avoid a confrontation with settlers over the outpost.

The dispute over whether to demolish the outpost, which is north-east of Ramallah, has taken on international importance because of concern over settlement expansion in the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967.

All Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including annexed east Jerusalem, are seen as illegal under international law, but Israel differentiates between those it has approved and those it has not.

Israel’s supreme court has determined that the Amona outpost was built on private Palestinian land and ordered the government to tear down the outpost’s 50 trailer homes by 25 December.

Amona is the largest of about 100 unauthorized outposts erected on the West Bank without permission but generally tolerated by the Israeli government.