High Court gives Amona residents deadline to sign nonviolence pledge

The High Court of Justice has given the residents of the Amona outpost a deadline to sign a guarantee that they will leave their homes peacefully, the court said in a statement Wednesday.

The court is set to rule on a request by the state for a month-and-a-half delay in the evacuation — currently ordered for December 25 — in order to allow time for the implementation of a compromise deal.

The High Court gave the Amona residents until 10 a.m. Thursday to submit their signed affidavits agreeing to the compromise arrangement that the residents struck with the government to avoid a forced evacuation. Under the deal, 24 of Amona’s 41 families would be moved to an adjacent plot of land while the rest would move to the nearby Ofra settlement.

Authorities are hoping the compromise deal can prevent a repeat of the violence that followed the destruction of several permanent buildings in the outpost in 2006.

But Amona residents have threatened to cancel the agreement if the court rejects the state’s request.

“We are not obligated by the agreement,” Amona spokesman Ofer Inbar told The Times of Israel earlier this week. “If they reject it, we will have to see what to do.”

Amona is the largest of about 100 unauthorized outposts — erected without permission but generally tolerated by the government — that dot the West Bank. In December 2014, after multiple appeals and delays, the court accepted the claim that the settlement was built on privately owned Palestinian land and ordered the outpost be evacuated within two years, or no later than December 25 of this year.

The state asked for the delay to prepare temporary housing solutions for the families slated to be evicted. If the request is accepted by the court, the new final date for the evacuation would be February 8, 2017.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian landowners came out against the state’s extension request, claiming in a letter to the High Court that despite the court ruling, the state never intended to return their land.

“The request to delay the evacuation, filed just four days before the court-ordered date, is the culmination of a two-year-long process to break down the respondents while keeping up appearance of preserving the values of rule of law, equality, protection of property rights and fairness,” they wrote.