Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Israel Approves Etzion Settlement Expansion

Israel’s military establishment has approved the establishment of a new, permanent neighborhood and a farm near the West Bank settlement of Efrat. The projects will go beyond the community’s current built-up area, constituting an effective expansion of the Etzion Bloc of settlements toward the north and north-east. After they are completed, Jewish settlement in northern Gush Etzion will reach the edges of Bethlehem’s southernmost suburbs.

The plan for the neighborhood was approved by Defense Minister Ehud Barak. It calls for building 40 single-family homes on Givat Hadagan, replacing the trailer park on this site at the northern edge of Efrat. The Israel Lands Administration this week published a tender for the homes, a move that requires the defense minister’s approval.

Approval for the farm was issued by the Israel Defense Forces. It will be built at Givat Eitam, located on the Palestinian side of the planned route of the separation barrier. Its establishment is designed to preserve the territory for the future expansion of Efrat.

Efrat is located on a series of hills on a mountain ridge east of Route 60, which connects the Palestinian cities of the West Bank. Each hill has its own name. Givat Hadagan, the northernmost one, is a few hundred meters from the Deheisheh refugee camp and from the Palestinian town of Al-Hadr, south of Bethlehem. Givat Hadagan was planned as a neighborhood of 500 homes. Construction was approved in the 1990s but never carried out for both diplomatic and bureaucratic reasons. In the late 1990s settlers turned the site into an unauthorized neighborhood of trailer homes that is today the campus of Yeshivat Siach Yitzhak.

Read more at haaretz.com

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.