US plans to construct a permanent embassy in Jerusalem have been put on hold due to red tape, Israel Hayom has learned.
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The Trump administration relocated the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv in 2018 but kept the Tel Aviv premises as a "branch office."
The former US Consulate building in Jerusalem has been rededicated as a temporary embassy, but it is too small to serve that function. It is slated to undergo a renovation, and the US is planning to build a permanent embassy building elsewhere in Jerusalem, with plans to open it in approximately 10 years.
However, the Israel Lands Authority and the Finance Ministry are deadlocked over the fate of a plot that has been allocated for the embassy building.
In 1988, the US State Department and the Israel Lands Authority agreed that should the US ever relocate its embassy to Jerusalem, Israel would swap land with the existing embassy, taking control over the property on Yarkon St. in Tel Aviv in exchange for a plot of land in Jerusalem known as the Allenby Plot.
The ILA agreed to the State Department's request that US be allowed to take possession of the Allenby Plot before vacating the Tel Aviv property, but conditioned its agreement on the Finance Ministry compensating it for revenue lost during the transition period.
The Finance Ministry has refused and says that the ILA's budget must cover revenue lost during the transition period, but has agreed to look into the possibility of finding government funding to cover the ILA's losses.
Until the matter can be resolved, the ILA has refused to transfer ownership over the Allenby Plot.
However, the question of payment is only part of the problem. Several Palestinian families in the US and east Jerusalem have presented rental contracts and other documents proving they owned the land chosen for the new US embassy in Jerusalem before the 1948 War of Independence, Haaretz reported Monday night.
The families are calling on the US and Israel to cancel their plans to build the diplomatic complex.
Together with the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the families Habib, Qleibo, El Khalidi, Razzaq and El-Khalili have presented rental contracts that existed between their ancestors and the British Mandate government. The papers show that Britain rented the Allenby Plot from Palestinian landowners, who allowed them to build a military base there.
In 1950, the Allenby Plot, along with all Palestinian property in west Jerusalem, was transferred to Israeli authorities under the Absentee Property Law, in which Israel took control of property abandoned by Palestinian refugees.
i24NEWS contributed to this report.
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