Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit recently gave the go-ahead to a plan that will legalize thousands of homes in Judea and Samaria. The initiative will normalize the status of thousands of homes which have been in legal limbo for years. The legal opinion was signed after three years of intensive labor by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, Mandelblit and Deputy Legal Advisor Erez Kaminitz. Following Mandelblit's approval, thousands of homes will now be approved after undergoing a cursory examination by the Defense Ministry. Many of these homes had been built with official government approval on what was thought to be state land. Decades letter, the Defense Ministry found that due to a series of mishaps, their homes had been built on private Arab land, leaving them exposed to lawsuits. The new legal opinion frees the homeowners to take out a mortgage on their property, sell their home, or get zoning permits, all things which had been prohibited before. Justice Minister Shaked said that "the Attorney General's decision constitutes concrete good news for settlements after years of stagnation. Uncertainty and the threat of demolition have come to an end, and we have changed the discourse of evacuation to a discourse of normalization and construction". "This is an appropriate Zionist response to the cruel murders of the past few days," added Shaked, noting the recent terror attacks in Ofra and Givat Assaf.
