Families moved into the rebuilt West Bank settlement of Ganim on Thursday, three years after the Knesset annulled legislation that facilitated its dismantlement along with three other northern West Bank settlements alongside Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

The smell of freshly poured asphalt hung in the air above Ganim’s newly made and only street, where future residents and their families — who had come to help with the move — smiled at the sight of their prefabricated homes.

“Twenty-one years after the terrible sin of the expulsion from [Gaza’s] Gush Katif and northern Samaria, we are finally erasing the disgrace of the expulsion from northern Samaria,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, using the biblical name for the northern West Bank.

About two dozen prefabricated homes have already been installed, while steamrollers and other construction machinery busily created new space for future houses on the hillside on Thursday.

Roughly a hundred people attended Thursday’s ceremony, including Defense Minister Israel Katz and Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria Regional Council.

“Here, this is the Land of Israel. Here, we are staying forever,” Katz said at the ceremony after arriving by helicopter.

“The era of evacuations is over. From here, we only build,” Dagan said.

In the valley below, Palestinians told AFP they fear Ganim’s construction will make their lives harder, or even mean displacement in the long run.

On both sides of........

© The Times of Israel