The plight of the people of the "border towns"

Talmud - Sanhedrin: "In the generation in which Ben David comes . . . people from the border towns will go from place to place and no-one will listen to them. . ." The plight of the evictees continues! This from Arutz7 www.israelnn.com Landau: Likud to Debate Plight of Gush Katif Evictees 10:13 Oct 20, '05 / 17 Tishrei 5766 By Naomi Grossman

Landau has called for the Likud Party to debate the issue in two weeks’ time at the opening of the Knesset’s winter session. Two months after the expulsion, the former residents of Elei Sinai still have not found a communal housing solution for their community. At the moment, they are currently living in a tent camp at the Yad Mordechai junction, and Wednesday’s heavy rain caught them totally unprepared. The spokesperson for the evictees, Sarita Maoz, told Kol Yisrael that they wrote to the prime minister eight days previously, asking for an urgent meeting. While the situation is being handled by what Mrs. Maoz referred to as “clerks,” no progress is being made, necessitating the prime minister’s involvement. “Until now, we have not received any reply,” stated Mrs. Maoz. Meanwhile, expellees from the communities of Bedollach, Morag and Kfar Yam, who had been living at the Shirat Hayam Hotel in Ashkelon, were evicted from the hotel the day before the festival of Sukkos. Since then, they have been living in “makeshift” accommodation and are receiving meals from the soup kitchens in Sderot. For its part, the disengagement authority has asserted that the evictees have refused all suggested solutions, making negotiations impossible. MK Landau stated that it is important to note that the evictees who were thrown out of the hotel in Ashkelon are from Morag and Bedollach, communities whose residents had in fact signed agreements with the authority to move to caravillas and had even been prepared to leave their homes before the disengagement. The disengagement authority therefore should have prepared the caravillas for them even before August 19th, when the expulsion took place. Instead, “they sent them to a hotel in the Dead Sea area and the Shirat Hayam Hotel in Ashkelon, which didn’t solve any of their problems,” noted Mr. Landau. “They even threw some of them into a hotel in Tiberias for a few days.” Landau added that he personally visited the Shirat Hayam Hotel two weeks ago. “There was a social welfare officer there, working for the disengagement authority, who couldn’t supply any answers. You could see that if she had wanted to reply, she would have given a searing condemnation of the authority. But she obviously couldn’t do that, being a member of the authority herself.” Apart from the camp at Yad Mordechai, Landau, who is running for the leadership of the Likud Party, toured Nitzan and the “city of faith” adjacent to Netivot. During the tour, Landau called for an appropriate solution for the housing plight of the evictees from Gush Katif and northern Samaria, as well as an urgent party debate on the issue in time for the opening of the Knesset winter session. Landau stated that he believes that this is not a political problem but rather a social one. “There was a disengagement, and there are now ten thousand people here who need to be taken care of,” he said. He added that it was time to demand a more humane response from the Prime Minister’s Office, and that he hoped that the issue would also stir the members of the Knesset and the general public. “Let’s put the politics to one side and just help the evictees,” stated Landau

See also this report.