The site opened in March 2006. But on August 3 of that year a big bulldozer from the Civil Administration came and tore up the road and installed seven barriers of large boulders and mounds of dirt. With the encouragement of the village council, the residents reopened the road so they could resume using the site. Several months went by, and then inspectors from the Civil Administration again closed the road, and also confiscated the truck used to remove wastefrom three villages (Qatana, Diya and Beit Anan) for 40 days. It was returned after receipt of an NIS 10,000 payment and a written commitment that it would not be used at the site again.
From 1997 to 2002, the villages of Beit Lakiya and Beit Sira used the dump to the north of them, near the gas station on Highway 443. But five years ago, the Civil Administration forbid them to continue using it. The Beit Lakiya garbage bintruck was confiscated and spent six months sitting in a Civil Administration lot. It was returned full of dents and other problems, and still does not run smoothly.
For lack of an alternative, the garbage binfrom Beit Lakiya is being dumped at a site just a few hundred meters from the village houses, amid olive groves. A guard and his daughters remain there to try to keep people from dumping garbagebin in an uncontrolled way or setting it on fire. Still, the metal collectors often come and burn the plastic, and the heavy, searing smoke reaches the houses.
The Civil Administration told Haaretz that the two sites were unlicensed, and therefore were closed. Representatives of the villages say they heard from Civil Administration inspectors that the sites were closed because they are in Area C. It's a bit of a problem when the vast majority of the village lands in the area are defined as part of Area C, meaning they cannot be developed. In Beit Lakiya, out of 16,000 dunams, only 1,080 are defined as being part of Area A or Area B. And 4,000 dunams were swallowed up on the other side of the separation fence. In Beit Anan, out of 12,000 dunams, just 1,241 are defined as part of Area B (Israeli security control and Palestinian administrative control). The rest is Area C. This is more or less the situation in all the villages northwest of Jerusalem and west of Ramallah. "And the Civil Administration," says the mayor of Beit Lakiya, "always tells us that Area C is Israeli territory."W
