Eight months after the High Court of Justice ordered the state to dismantle the segment of the separation fence near the Palestinian village of Bil'in within "a reasonable amount of time," the Defense Ministry has yet to do so. It has not even begun to plan an alternative route there, in accordance with the court's instruction.
These steps are not included in the Defense Ministry's work plan for 2008. A spokesman for the ministry, Shlomo Dror, said yesterday that the omission stems from budget constraints, and said he hoped that planning the alternative route would be included in the work plan for 2009 - in other words, a year and a quarter after the High Court ruling, at the very least. In September 2007, the High Court ruled that a 1,700-meter segment of the separation fence near Bil'in must be dismantled and moved to an alternative route. The court said Israel built the segment in question on land appropriated from Palestinians, falsely citing security needs when the main objective was to enable the expansion of a nearby settlement, Modi'in Ilit (Kiryat Sefer). Furthermore, the justices ruled that the current route is topographically inferior, which endangers the security forces that patrol the area.
The justices, presided over by Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch, ruled that the current route was planned in order to include part of Modi'in Ilit's planned neighborhood of Matityahu East on the Israeli side. Therefore, the justices said the alternative route must be set without taking into account the settlement's development plans.
Despite this, contractors recently began to lay the groundwork for building the eastern part of the neighborhood, on land the High Court ruled should be east of the fence.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/977469.html
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