Homesh Yeshiva students built a permanent building for the yeshiva in the West Bank on Sunday night, the Samaria Regional Council announced on Monday morning.
The yeshiva was in a Northern Samaria town that Israel withdrew from as part of the 2005 disengagement, together with the evacuation of Gaza. The Knesset passed the Disengagement Repeal Law in March, legalizing a return to some of areas of Northern Samaria.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered IDF Central Command head Yehuda Fox to sign an order earlier this month, officially allowing Israelis enter Homesh, Sa-Nur, Ganim and Kadim.
Samaria Regional Council chairman Yossi Dagan installed a mezuzah by the yeshiva’s door on Monday, saying that it was a “historical moment” that “fixed not only a personal injustice towards those expelled [from Homesh] but to all of the people of Israel.”
Though the yeshiva’s current structures are modular buildings, the council said that they will be its “permanent home.”
Students build the new Homesh Yeshiva building in northern Samaria. (credit: ROI HADI)The new location is “on state-owned land, a few hundred meters from where it was previously, in order to arrange its legal status,” the council stated.
The move was met with mixed reactions
NGO Yesh Din, which represents the Palestinians who claim the land on which the yeshiva previously stood, said that “moving the yeshiva in Homesh makes the crime worse.
“The new location of the yeshiva still does not allow the Palestinian landowners access to their land and continues their dispossession from their land,” the organization stated. “Instead of immediately evacuating the outpost, Israel is giving a prize to trespassing criminals.”
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said the reopening of the yeshiva “symbolized the move from a destructive government to construction and development of the entire State of Israel.”
Settlements Minister Orit Struck said the reopening of the Homesh Yeshiva symbolized that this government was keeping its promises to its voters.
“We struggled and we did it…If you believe that it can be ruined, believe that it can be fixed,” she said.
Labor leader Merav Michaeli MK said Gallant gave “a VIP card to the deranged settlers from Homesh and their destructive whims is at the expense of Israel’s security, its future and its democracy. These are the priorities of this government.”
Michaeli referred to Gallant’s sacking by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his call to slow down the judicial reform process and Netanyahu’s reversal weeks later.
“Gallant proved today that he does not care about the majority of the people and the hundreds of thousands who supported him after he was ‘fired.’ He cares about the anarchist settlers and Netanyahu’s interests,” she stated.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said last week: “We are deeply troubled by the Israeli government’s order that allows its citizens to establish a permanent presence in the Homesh outpost in the northern West Bank, which according to Israeli law was illegally built on private Palestinian land.”
Miller added that the order is inconsistent with understandings between former prime minister Ariel Sharon and former US president George W. Bush in an exchange of letters in 2004. The Obama administration, in which US President Joe Biden was vice president, rejected in 2011 the validity and content of those letters.
The French foreign ministry also spoke out against rebuilding Homesh, saying doing so would violate international law.
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