Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called on Sunday for a postponement of the evacuation of Khan al-Ahmar, warning that the move could have negative political consequences, Ynet reported.
The contentious issue of the illegal Bedouin village located between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, “has been on the table of Israeli governments for several years,” Lapid wrote in a letter to Cabinet Secretary Shalom Shlomo.
“Given that the [current] government has just been formed, and hasn’t had time to examine the issue in depth and independent of the previous governments’ conclusions, and noting that this is a particularly sensitive issue … I request that the necessary conditions for evacuation be examined and that an in-depth study of all the legal and international ramifications of the move be conducted,” he added.
Khan al-Ahmar is one of more than 170 illegal outposts created by the Palestinian Authority and funded by the European Union, according to the NGO Regavim.
On a tour of the outpost in January 2019, then-Economy Minister Eli Cohen remarked that it “was built with the help of foreign interests that are meddling in Area C,” the part of Judea and Samaria that is under full Israeli jurisdiction according to the Oslo Accords.
“The State of Israel has laws, and those laws must be obeyed,” he said.