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TITLE: Evacuated Settlers' Homes to be Sold to Residents of Palestinian State |
AUTHOR: Akiva Eldar |
PUB: Ha'aretz |
DATE: December 30, 2000 |
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Israel has agreed, as part of the proposed final status agreement, to transfer, in their entirety, all the settlements that will be evacuated of their occupants. Senior political sources confirmed that according to the plan formulated by the World Bank, the settlers' homes, their fields and their public structures, would be sold to territories' residents. The homes of territories residents whom move to the settlements would in turn be given to refugees, mainly those who come from Lebanon. The assessment is that annexing 5% of the West Bank would entail Israel evacuating about a quarter of the settlers (and not 20% as Prime Minister Ehud Barak claims). This would entail evacuating more than 50,000 people, who live in about 9,000 housing units. The sum that would be accredited to Israel in exchange for the property left behind, would be considered partially as Israel's contribution to the International Committee for Rehabilitating the Refugees headed by the government of Sweden, and would also partly be used for compensating evacuated settlers -- but only those who leave their homes in good condition. The people behind the plan for refugee rehabilitation inside the Palestinian State decided not to settle them in evacuated settlements in order to avoid establishing refugee towns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip without available sources of employment. The World Bank also does not want to create a wide gap between the housing conditions of refugees absorbed in the Palestinian State and those rehabilitated in Jordan and Syria. It was therefore decided that the PA would sell the evacuated homes to territories' residents who live near the settlements. It is assumed that those who buy them will be middle class people who want to improve their standard of living. The access roads and the public infrastructure that Israel built for the settlements will also be considered in the final tally. END |