Last update - 00:00 16/08/2007
MK Schneller: Cabinet approved settlers' stay in Hebron market
By Nadav Shragai, Haaretz Correspondent
The deal to allow Jewish settlers to remain in the Hebron wholesale market received the cabinet's approval before it was canceled last year, Knesset Member Otniel Schneller from Kadima said Wednesday.
The settlers were evicted from their homes last week, after Attorney General Menachem Mazuz determined that a deal they had made with the Israel Defense Forces was void, and that the army had no mandate to have made the offer in the first place.
Then commander of IDF forces in the West Bank, Brigadier General Yair Golan, promised settlers that they would be allowed to return to homes they had been illegally occupying in Hebron's wholesale market, if those living there left peacefully.
During a discussion in Jerusalem by the Knesset's subcommittee on the settlements in the West Bank, Schneller - himself a settler and a member of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's ruling party - said that cabinet figures had in fact approved the deal that Mazuz later nixed.
Schneller also said that the deal received the approval of then GOC Central Command, Yair Naveh. His subordinate officer, Golan, was reprimanded by then chief-of-staff Dan Halutz for conducting deals with the settlers "on his own accord."
In the discussion, it also emerged that the Civil Administration - the government body responsible for civilian life in the territories - recommended the settlers pay rent for the Jewish-owned assets they had occupied. The administration's committee rejected the settlers' appeal to reconsider the decision to evict them.
Schneller read out an internal document from the Military Advocate General, which stated that the contract with the Arab occupants of the assets could be legally terminated to allow the asset's owners to rent them out to Jewish tenants in accordance with the owners' wishes.
The committee agreed to request the cabinet to "perform a thorough inspection aimed at regulating Jewish presence in the market, through dialogue and according to law."