ByTOVAH LAZAROFF
Defense Minister Benny Gantz would prefer to persuade the residents of Evyatar to leave their West Bank outpost homes by choice rather than evict them by force.

“In the last few days, I have attempted to arrange an agreed evacuation from the site,” Gantz said in a letter he wrote to Shas Party head Arye Deri on Sunday.

Gantz spoke hours before the midnight deadline on Sunday, by which in the pre-dawn hours of Monday, the IDF could already move in to legally evacuate the hilltop community of 50 families located off of Route 505 in the Samaria region of the West Bank.
 

The fledgling community was founded last month by the Samaria Regional Council and the Nahala Movement in the aftermath of the Tapuach junction terror attack in which 19-year-old Yehuda Guetta was killed.

The IDF has said that the outpost was built illegally and must be removed. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Gantz have supported that position.

A government compromise could be in the works, however, by which outpost residents would voluntarily leave and in their place an IDF base would erect, KAN reported on Sunday and the small modular structures erected at the site would remain, as would the few paved roads.

The government would examine the legal status of the land and if possible, authorize Jewish construction on the hilltop. Once the community is authorized, the families who moved in there over the last month would be allowed to return, Kan said.

Two independent sources told The Jerusalem Post that such a compromise was indeed under discussion.

Right-wing politicians from the opposition who visited the site on Sunday called on the government not to evacuate it.

Deri led a delegation of Shas politicians on a solidarity visit to Evyatar and called on Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to convene the cabinet to discuss the matter and authorize the outpost, noting that the situation had policy implications that should not solely be left in the hands of the IDF.
 

This is a “political matter” and not a “private one,” Deri said, and it involves principles relating to the settlement movement and policies of the Israeli government.

“The cabinet needs to understand all the implications for the place, for the whole region and for all of Israel [and for] its policy vis-à-vis the Palestinian Authority,” Deri said.

Gantz told Deri in a letter that the evacuation of Evyatar was solely under his purview and urged him to call on the residents to leave voluntarily.

Tensions around the site have risen as dozens of young right-wing activists joined the community in solidarity to help prevent the IDF from razing it. On Sunday night the Religious Zionist Youth put out an urgent message in which it urged its members to head to Evyatar out of fear of a pending evacuation.
 

Palestinians from the nearby villages, primarily Beita, have also taken matters into their own hands and attempted to literally smoke out the residents. They have lit fires nearby that fill the air around the outpost with heavy black smoke that makes it difficult for Evyatar residents to breathe.

The IDF has said that the outpost’s creation has inflamed tensions and has forced it to divert forces needed elsewhere.

Former Kedumim Council head Daniella Weiss, who leads the Nahala movement said the opposite was the case.

The creations of Evyatar was the “appropriate Zionist answer to terror attacks,” she said.

Eyatar has become “a symbol of the will of Jews in the Land of Israel to hold onto the land to prevent the expansion of Arabs over government land [in Judea and Samaria],” Weiss said.