The last residents of three households in the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Givat Amal are to be forcibly removed from their homes on Monday morning, to make way for large-scale residential tower construction on the site.
MK Ilan Gilon (Meretz) has vowed to protest at the site on Monday, saying that he will try to prevent the evictions.“I intend to ensure that David Ben-Gurion’s promise of a roof over every head will be carried out,” Gilon said Sunday, and called for developers to stop the evictions and help reach a housing alternative for the residents.
In mid-September 20 families were forcibly evicted by police from their houses in Givat Amal, after a long legal battle that reached the Supreme Court and included a hunger strike.
The neighborhood was established by the government during the War of Independence to protect the outer borders of Tel Aviv but is now well within the central part of Tel Aviv, bordered by Namir street to the west, the Ayalon Highway to the east, the Bavli neighborhood to the north, and the Halacha Bridge to the south.
The families who were there in the late 1940s never received legal ownership rights and have now raised three generations in the neighborhood. The fight over ownership came to a head when the land was bought by tycoon Yitzhak Tshuva, who decided to turn it into a luxury residential complex.
The residents have stated that they were promised compensation by the government if they relocated, but were later told that since they did not have papers indicating ownership, they would not be compensated.
