Evicted Amona residents launch hunger strike

Residents of the recently demolished West Bank outpost of Amona on Thursday launched a hunger strike to protest the government’s failure so far to fulfill its pledge to build a new settlement for the evacuated hilltop community.

Organizers said hunger-striking residents would remain outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jerusalem residence until their illegal outpost was replaced with a new West Bank community in accordance with a deal they struck with the government ahead of the court-ordered evacuation of Amona in January.

“Today, we, the residents of Amona, begin a hunger strike that will continue until the prime minister and his ministers stand by their commitment to build us a new settlement in [the central West Bank region of] Binyamin where we can rebuild our lives,” Amona resident Tamar Nizri said.

“Building a community is a basic need, like food,” she added. “You destroyed an entire community; now you must build us one.”

The hunger strike is being led by the leader of the campaign against the settlement’s destruction, Avichai Boaron; the head of Amona’s secretariat, Ori Shag; and the settlement’s rabbi, Yair Frank.

Under an agreement signed with the government ahead of the evacuation, the residents were allowed to pick a new site to rebuild their community, which would be the first state-sanctioned new settlement to be built in decades.

The residents of Amona voted to move to the Geulat Tzion unauthorized outpost, located in the Shiloh settlement bloc. While Amona was built on privately owned Palestinian land, Geulat Tzion lies on a state-owned plot.

According to the deal, the new settlement was to be set up within two months.

On February 19, Netanyahu reportedly told members of the security cabinet that the government may have to renege on the pledge to set up the new West Bank settlement, following a request by US President Donald Trump to “hold back” on settlement construction.

But in an apparent effort to walk back the leaked comments, a senior aide from the Prime Minister’s Office told reporters the next day that there is “absolutely no intention to violate the commitment that was made to the settlers of Amona.”

The clarification did not satisfy the demolished outpost’s leadership, who held Netanyahu and Education Minister Naftali Bennett responsible for the displaced families.

“The government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett has lost the justification for its existence,” Amona leaders said in a statement announcing the hunger strike.

They lamented the government’s decision to evacuate Amona after the High Court ruled that it was built illegally on private Palestinian land.

“One destruction follows another. Their word is worthless,” they said in the statement released on the same day nine illegally built homes in the West Bank settlement of Ofra were demolished.

Amona spokesman Ofer Inbar told The Times of Israel earlier this week the timing of the protest was not intentionally planned to coincide with the Ofra evacuations. “It’s been a month since the evacuation. We’ve had enough,” he said.

Raphael Ahren and Jacob Magid contributed to this report.