Border police reportedly on way to Ulpana

Some 15 hilltop youth break into home in outpost during evacuation; 32 of 33 families peacefully leave, final family refuses.

By TOVAH LAZAROFF
Ulpana holdout Fatal speaks with Defense Ministry workers 37 (photo credit: Tovah Lazaroff)
Ulpana holdout Fatal speaks with Defense Ministry workers 37
(photo credit: Tovah Lazaroff)
The border police are reportedly on their way to the Ulpana outpost on the outskirts of the West Bank Beit El settlement to evacuate some 15 hilltop youth who have broken into a second floor apartment in one of the empty buildings slated for removal.
It is at least the second time that hilltop youth forced their way into an empty home in Ulpana, since families began to leave on Tuesday.
Thirty-two out of 33 families who lived in five apartment buildings slated for removal left peacefully on Thursday and Tuesday.
The 33rd family, Yiska and Yoel Fatal have told Defense Ministry workers that they do not want to leave their apartment.
They have done nothing to pack up their three-room home, on the top floor of a three-story buildings, with a view of Beit El and the nearby Palestinian city of Ramallah.
“If you want us to leave you have to take us out of here,” Yiska Fatal told two workers in neon yellow vests who walked into her living room in the late afternoon.
“We have been sent to help you,” one of the men said.
“We do not want to leave,” she said.
As workers lugged boxes and furniture out of her neighbors’ apartment she watched from the window.
Earlier in the day, a Defense Ministry official came to speak with her husband, but was given the same response.
A few neighbors are in the apartment waiting with the Fatal family, along with some photographers.
Their home is in the same building, in which the hilltop youth are holed up, just one floor below.
Throughout the day, Ulpana residents thwarted attempts by hilltop youth to physically resist the evacuation.
Ulpana spokesman Harel Cohen called the teens “anarchists.”
The High Court of Justice ordered the state to evacuate the five structures by July 1 because they were built without permits on land designated by the state as private Palestinian property.
The Defense Ministry plans to physically relocate the structures, to an authorized plot of land in Beit El, through a process that will take a year.
In the interim families have moved into modular homes in Beit El especially set up for them by the Defense Ministry.