Police make preventive arrests ahead of settlement homes evacuation

Police have begun a series of preventive arrests of far-right activists ahead of the scheduled evacuation of nine buildings in the West Bank settlement of Ofra that were built without permits on private Palestinian land.

The nine buildings, eight of them homes, were slated to have been demolished by February 8, but the evacuation was pushed off until March 5 following a request to the High Court of Justice for a delay. The structures were originally ordered by the court to be destroyed in February 2015.

As part of their efforts to avoid a repeat of the violent scenes that occurred during the evacuation of the illegal West Bank outpost of Amona earlier this month, police are taking steps to prevent far-right activists and youth from reaching Ofra, including the arrest of a 20-year-old Jerusalem resident on Sunday suspected of planning to disrupt the upcoming demolitions — after he refused to sign a police order prohibiting him from entering the settlement.

Following his arrest, the man was brought before a judge at the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court, who issued a restraining order forbidding him from stepping foot in Ofra for the next fifteen days, according the Hebrew-language Haaretz daily.

Judge Karen Miller said that while there “is no reasonable suspicion of a criminal offense of obstructing a police officer [in the fulfillment of their duty],” as claimed by police, “there is reasonable suspicion of conspiracy [to commit a crime].”

A lawyer for the arrested man, Nati Rom of the Honenu legal aid group, wrote on Facebook that police violated his client’s freedom of expression, and that the decision to arrest his client over possible future crimes “does not exist in the law books.”

Rom said Honenu was considering an appeal.

The group, which provides legal aid to far-right activists, also claimed that another individual, a minor, was detained for the same reason in recent days, but was released after acquiescing to a police order to keep away from Ofra.

Border Police officers over the weekend cleared a number of far-right activists from one the buildings set to be demolished in Ofra. Those inside the building, which is abandoned, were reportedly attempting to barricade themselves to resist the upcoming evacuation.

The actual residents of the homes in question have not sought confrontation, saying in a statement, “We will not use crowbars and we will not barricade ourselves” inside the homes. Most of the families living in the buildings have already left, the Ynet news site reported.

Earlier this month, over 5,000 protested the evacuation at a rally in Ofra, with prominent nationalist-religious leader Rabbi Haim Druckman vowing at the demonstration that “we will continue to settle the Land of Israel…. We are not thieves.”

The original case against the nine buildings was brought before the High Court in 2008 by the left-leaning Yesh Din legal organization, which represented the Palestinian landowner.

A report published in the same year by another Israeli rights group, B’Tselem, said some 60 percent of the built-up area of Ofra lies on land that is registered to Palestinians. The claims to private ownership of lands in settlements like Ofra and the Amona outpost are based on the pre-1967 Jordanian land registry, which Israel adopted after it captured the West Bank from the Jordanians that year.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.