Israel puts 1,234 settlement units in E1 out to tender
Three Israeli organisations petitioning against the plan say the state had undertaken to warn them before any E1 tender, and told them in July that none was due for two to three months.
The Israeli government issued a tender on Tuesday for 1,234 housing units in the southern part of E1, the tract of roughly 12,000 dunams of occupied land that lies between Jerusalem and the settlement of Maale Adumim.
The offer covers seven settlement complexes and takes in industrial and tourism components alongside the housing, together with roads and infrastructure networks. It moves a scheme that had rested at the approval and planning stage into the marketing of land.
Ir Amim, Bimkom and Peace Now said in a joint statement that the units now on offer come to about 36 percent of the 3,401 approved across the wider E1 plan.
The three organisations are petitioners in a case against the project that is still open before the Jerusalem District Court, and they said the State Attorney's Office had given a formal undertaking to notify them before any E1 tender was published.
They said the same office told them on 19 July that no tender was expected for another two to three months, and that they learned of this one only when the government announced it. The state has yet to file its response to the petition.
The timing is what gives the step its weight. A tender is the point at which a plan stops being a drawing and becomes land offered to buyers, and issuing one while the court has not ruled narrows the range of what judges can still undo.
The organisations described the move as an effort to push the project forward while holding down the reach of legal scrutiny. E1 has drawn objections from abroad for more than three decades, through a succession of Israeli governments that went on advancing it.