The government has told Gaza Strip settlers they could move en masse to an environmentally sensitive area in southern Israel, a senior Cabinet minister said yesterday.
Settler representatives who met with government officials Monday night were told the government would build up to four new towns for them if they move to the Nitzanim area on the southern Israeli coast, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni said.
"The government clarified what it is willing to promise the settlers who fear -- and possibly with some justification -- that on the day after [the pullout], no one will have an interest in advancing a [resettlement] plan, and therefore we promised to guarantee legislation and fast-track planning,'' Livni told Israel Radio.
The ball is now in the settlers' court, Livni said.
"We just asked to know within a few days whether they are interested in moving ahead on this because if they are, then the government already has to erect trailers immediately," she said.
The government served notice more than a year ago that it would dismantle all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four small communities in the northern West Bank this summer, which are home to 9,000 Israelis. But settlers have refused to make alternative housing and employment plans, seeing that as capitulation to an evacuation program they deplore.
Yitzhak Meron, a lawyer representing settlers, told Israel Army Radio it wasn't clear settlers would accept the Nitzanim project.
"A large number of people aren't able to make a decision right now," Meron said.
Environmentalists have objected to the Nitzanim project, afraid new towns in the area would destroy natural sand dunes.
Livni insisted the plan would not create an environmental hazard.
"No one plans to put the settlers on the dunes," she told Israel Army Radio.
The Nitzanim project was advanced because it gives settlers the opportunity to move as a community, she said.
"If group relocation can make resettlement easier, then it is our obligation to do it," she said, adding that "it is clear" to settlers that the government won't increase the amount of compensation it has promised evacuees.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
RSS