The Civil Administration responds: "The Civil Administration has been working for a long time to eradicate this phenomenon. The head of the Civil Administration, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, recently signed two injunctions that will give legal force to the prohibition against putting wastein unlicensed sites and the prohibition against causing olfactory hazards and air pollution. The Civil Administration's inspection unit regularly carries out enforcement actions at the unlicensed wastedisposal sites in Judea and Samaria. In June and July, dozens of confiscations were made of dump trucks, mechanical engineering equipment and shelters."
And yet, every day, dozens of Israeli drivers continue to bring Israeli waste to the western part of the West Bank, to an area that is under full Israeli responsibility, via Israeli military checkpoints. The managers of the unlicensed sites continue to accept the Israeli waste and garbage bincompletely unhindered. What a difference between the helplessness of the Civil Administration here, to judge by the results at least, and its energetic activity against the villages northwest of Jerusalem, which are searching for an orderly dump site sufficiently distant from homes and schools, where they could dispose of their waste.
The regulated site closed
Until 2004, the Beit Anan municipality used to collect and dump waste at a site south of the village that had been in operation since before the Palestinian Authority was established. In 2004, the separation fence was built in the area, and the village was no longer permitted to use the site. As a temporary alternative, the municipality had to choose an empty and isolated plot of land located amid olive groves, on the edge of a road connecting it with nearby villages.
This was during a period of proliferating checkpoints, which made it impossible to dispose of waste in the overflowing sites in Ramallah and El-Bireh. Meanwhile, west of the village, far from the concentration of homes and the cultivated land, there is an area totaling 56 dunams that is owned by the village council. Beit Anan and six other local villages decided to create a common waste disposal site there. A dirt road was paved on the side of the mountain and covered with gravel. Village officials began thinking about ways to recycle the waste, about planting trees along the road, about charging each truck a small sum.
