After more than half a year of waiting, work finally began Tuesday on a new town in Samaria to house the 42 families evacuated from their homes in Amona earlier this year.
Last December, residents of Amona signed onto a deal offered by the government to evacuate their homes in exchange for new housing in Samaria.
After the Supreme Court intervened to block plans for relocating part of Amona to nearby plots on the same hill where the town was originally located, the government agreed to house all 42 Amona families in a new community, to be built in the Shiloh bloc in Samaria.
While the project was supposed to begin prior to the evacuation of Amona in February, the plans for the new town, Amichai, were shelved for months.
Now, six months after the original compromise agreement and almost five months since the evacuation, construction teams broke ground on Amichai, the first concrete steps towards a housing solution for the 42 families removed from Amona.
Earlier this month, the Civil Administration authorized the new town, making Amichai the first new officially sanctioned Jewish town in Judea and Samaria in a quarter century, since the Rabin government imposed a freeze on new towns in 1992.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced via Facebook that construction had begun.
“Today, work has begun on the ground, as I promised, for the establishment of a new town for the residents of Amona. I have the merit of being the Prime Minister to build the first new town in Judea and Samaria after decades [of no new towns being authorized].”
“There never was nor will there ever be a better government for the settlers than our government.”