Jerusalem municipality poised to grant settler group new building permits

Israeli authorities will discuss tomorrow new building permits for projects managed by the right-wing settler-run group Elad, located in Abu Tor.

According to NGO Ir Amim, the Jerusalem municipality’s Local Planning and Building Committee will consider requests by the group for a recreational zip-line cable course, and an additional floor for a one storey building “currently serving as an operations centre for Elad’s tourist activities”.

That latter building, “conveyed to Elad by the Israel Land Authority, is located on land zoned as green space on the area master plan; awarding of a building permit should therefore stand in violation to the master plan”, adds the NGO.

Elad runs a number of national parks and touristic settlement operations in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, including the so-called City of David project in Silwan.

There, Israeli authorities “transferred daily management responsibilities to Elad – a private settler organisation working systematically, over the past three decades, to take over Palestinian properties in Silwan – without a transparent tender process”, states Ir Amim.

According to Ir Amim: “The privatisation of national parks and tourist sites to settler organisations is an integral component of the settlement enterprise, serving as an effective and sophisticated instrument for the de facto takeover of land, limiting building and development of Palestinian neighbourhoods, and rewriting the historic memory of the area.”