Israeli Press
Israel resettles Ganim in the northern West Bank after 21 years
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Settlers moved back onto the ground at Ganim on Thursday morning, twenty-one years after Israel evacuated the place.
A core group of families took up residence, and dozens of caravans went up to house them and the religious institutions that the Bnei David network will run there, the Israeli news site Ynet reported. Ganim sits near Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank.
It was one of four settlements — with Kadim, Homesh and Sa-Nur — that Israel emptied in 2005 alongside the Gaza Strip. All four are now being re-established at once, after the Knesset stripped the northern West Bank out of the disengagement law and the cabinet approved the regularisation of dozens of outposts.
Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister who has driven the file, framed the morning as a reversal of history rather than a housing announcement.
Twenty-one years after the terrible sin of the expulsion, we are finally erasing the disgrace of the northern expulsion.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli finance minister
He said eleven new settlements had been founded in the area this summer, taking it in his count from four communities to eighteen, and argued their presence shields the cities of central Israel. He also predicted that some future Israeli government would try to undo the work.
For Palestinians in the villages around Jenin the arithmetic is land, and it moves the other way: each new caravan cluster narrows the ground between one settlement and the next.
The families at Qusra, sealed in their homes by settlers since Sunday, were still counting the days as the caravans arrived.
