Internally Displaced Palestinians Still Waiting to Return to their Villages
Members of the current Labor government committee on the future of Palestinian residents from the villages of Iqrit and Bir'am,
including Yossi Beilin, Avraham Shochat, Haim Oron, Haim Ramon, as well as Yossi Kucik, director general of the prime minister's ffice, visited the area in advance of the High Court's expected May ruling on the residents petition to finally return to their villages some five decades after an initial High Court ruling in their favor. Recommendations supported by the current committee (Ha’aretz, 21 March 2000) include those set down by a 1996 committee under the previous Labor government. These include:  Allocation of 900 dunums of land together for both villages even though the villages owned a total of 28,000 dunums in 1948 before they were expelled and the villages were razed to the ground.

  The land will be allocated as a long-term lease with ownership remaining in the hands of the state of Israel.

  1. Residents will receive a 500 sq. meter plot of land on which a home limited to three stories and three living units may be built.
  2.  The residents must sign a waiver that extinguishes all other demands.
  3. The new villages may not be built on the village sites, which will be declared antiquity sites. In Iqrit, this would mean that the church which still stands and is used by residents would be placed under joint administration ofthe Ma'aleh Yosef regional council, the Antiquities Authority and the National Parks Authority.

The recommendations, which fall far short of the basic rights of return and restitution, havebeen rejected by residents of the villages