Compromise is reached with outpost’s settlers
JERUSALEM — Israel has reached a compromise with Jewish settlers who rapidly established an unauthorized outpost in the occupied West Bank last month, officials and the settlers said Wednesday.
Under the agreement, the settlers will leave by the end of the week. The area will become a closed military zone, but the houses and roads will remain in place. A survey will be carried out that the settlers say will prove the outpost was not established on land privately owned by Palestinians. That would pave the way for authorization, allowing them to establish a religious school and for some families to return.
The settlers named the outpost Eviatar, after an Israeli killed by a Palestinian in 2013, and say it is home to dozens of families. It posed an early test for Israel’s new government, which relies on a fragile coalition including parties that support and oppose the settlers.
Palestinians in nearby villages say the outpost was built on their land and fear it will grow and merge with larger settlements nearby. They have held neardaily protests against the outpost in which demonstrators hurl stones at Israeli troops, who fire tear gas and live ammunition. At least four protesters, including two teenagers, have been killed in the clashes.
Israeli Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, a member of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s prosettler party, tweeted that the deal is “an important achievement” for the settlement movement. Public Security Minister Omer Barlev, from the leftwing Labor Party, welcomed the evacuation from the “illegal outpost.”
Nearly 500,000 Israelis live in more than 130 authorized settlements and dozens of outposts across the occupied West Bank. The Palestinians and much of the international community view all settlements as violation of international law and an obstacle to peace.