Over One Year Later: Former Gush Katif Residents Still Wrapped in Senseless, Cruel Red Tape…

Red Tape [Undoubtedly Deliberate and Punitive] Keeps Gaza Evacuees From New Homes By Tovah Lazaroff (Jerusalem Post)

Commentary;

Based on the past year ‘s track record of compelled justification by virtue of presentation to the bureaucracy of decades of electric or phone bills, arbitrary and punitive compensation awards despite presentation of all papers and documents, attempts to compel the former Gush Katif residents to sign fraudulent documents in order to secure their ‘advances’, deliberate sequestion of the former Gush Katif residents from their belongings placed in moving containers and held ransom by the Regime, DNA testing to prove their children, etc., undoubtedly the former Gush Katif Residents are being subjected by the Regime to yet more deliberate, cruel, senseless and punitive red tape in their efforts to reestablish their lives. MB

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Excerpts;

More than a year after they were removed from their homes in Gaza and northern Samaria, the first 21 of 1,400 evacuee families living in temporary group situations received permits to start building their new permanent homes on Thursday.

Government officials admitted on Thursday that the initial two-year timetable, which called for the final resettlement of all 1,400 evacuee families by August 2007, was optimistic.

“It will take some time,” said Interior Ministry spokesman Moshe Mosko, whose office is responsible for providing permits for the sites so that they can be released for construction.

He estimated that most of the families would receive permission to build new permanent homes within the next two years, thereby extending the initial process by a year.

The timetable went awry in the early stages, when settlers spent months, and in some cases close to a year, living in hotel rooms as they waited to move into their temporary modular homes.

Gaza evacuee leaders have been so upset by the delay that they sent the government a letter last month demanding the government move more quickly. But Mosko said while the pace was agonizing for the former settlers, permits for their homes were actually being pushed forward at a faster rate than other construction projects throughout the country.

Disengagement Authority spokesman Haim Altman said that of the 1,700 families evacuated from Gaza and four communities in northern Samaria, some 300 had opted to seek individual options. The 1,400 remaining families who struggled to find communal solutions had chosen final places for their new permanent homes in 20 different sites.

In each case there was a long, complicated story to explain the delay, said Altman.

Former Gaza resident Anita Tucker said the process of permanent resettlement in Yesodot has involved such burdensome bureaucracy for the members of the former Netzer Hazani settlements that they pooled their money and hired a full-time staff person to help them through the paper work and endless meetings.

They hired a second staff person to handle all the bureaucracy involved with living in their temporary site, Tucker said.