Amona residents are set to vote at 10:00 a.m. local time on a proposal reached overnight on Saturday between the settlement's representatives, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Education Minister Naftali Bennett at a meeting held in the prime minister's office in Jerusalem.The proposal will allow 24 of the outpost's families to remain on their hilltop in an area that, unlike the current location of the outpost, is not on privately-owned Palestinian land.The new offer doubles the amount of Amona residents who would be allowed to stay on the hill, in comparison to the proposal offered last week that the residents rejected.Like the previous offer, the current offer is contingent on the Supreme Court agreeing to allow all the residents to stay for one more month beyond the December 25 deadline by which the court previously determined that the outpost had to be destroyed.
Cabinet Secretary Tzachi Braverman would be put in charge of implementing the deal. The Amona residents in return would have to expel hundreds of teenagers who have come to support them due to an IDF concern that the teenagers would pose a security threat during the evacuation, should they violently demonstrate. Last night, area teens congregated to protest evacuation in a different way - by staging a dance party, as seen in this video by Jerusalem Post reporter Anna Aronheim: The Amona outpost was built in 1995 on private Palestinian land and now faces evacuation after the community voted 58 to 20 on December 14 against a proposal to peacefully resettle the families on a nearby plot of land.The proposal pushed by Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to move the outpost to an adjacent hilltop that is considered “absentee,” that is, the Palestinian owners are unknown. Amona residents said the proposal relocated only 12 of the approximately 40 families on the hill. The current outpost was built illegally in 1995 on the rocky hilltop overlooking the settlement of Ofra.Eliyahu Kamisher and Anna Ahronheim contributed to this report.Partying it up in #Amona tonight. pic.twitter.com/IbTeS6KsjZ
— Anna Ahronheim (@AAhronheim) December 17, 2016