TV: Entrepreneur paid NIS 2 million to police to evict families from TA neighborhood
Last month, a company working for billionaire real estate developer Yitzhak Tshuva paid police nearly 2 million shekels ($ 635,000) to evacuate the last residents refusing to leave a working-class neighborhood in Tel Aviv that is being redeveloped for luxury accommodation, Channel 13 reported.
The evacuation contractor paid the sum to the police to send over 1,000 officers to evacuate the few dozen people who refused to leave Givat Amal Bet, despite the authorities’ orders to do so.
Police told the network that they were authorized by law to assign officers to enforcement activities in exchange for additional payment, and in this case did so.
Givat Amal Bet was evacuated from its last inhabitants in November after a years-long legal battle.
The land on which the neighborhood was built had belonged to the state. In 2005, development rights to the land were acquired by Tshuva’s real estate company Elad Israel Residence, which then engaged in a 16-year legal battle to clean up the rest of the neighborhood.
While the land is now in the process of being developed by the Hagag group and YH Dimri, who bought the rights to Elad – and Tshuva himself recently sold his property to Elad – Tshuva remained legally responsible for the eviction and compensation of residents.
Houses evacuated from Givat Amal, towers of Bavli Park towering above them, November 23, 2021 (Carrie Keller-Lynn / Times of Israel)
Under a final court ruling in April this year, Tshuva was ordered to compensate residents about 3 million shekels ($ 970,000) for each of the 11 plots that had been occupied in 1961, the total owing to be divided among the 32 nuclear families who were ultimately deported seven months later.
Related: Tel Aviv neighborhood is gone, but evicted residents are still mired in the fight
Residents say the money they received from Tshuva, around NIS 1 to 2 million ($ 320,000 to $ 645,000) per nuclear family, is not fully compensatory. It is also not enough to buy decent accommodation in Tel Aviv, recently crowned the most expensive city in the world, where the average price of a four-room (three-bedroom) apartment exceeds 4 million shekels ($ 1.1 million). $ 3 million).