In preparation for the approval of the budget for transportation projects in Judea and Samaria, Ron Luba, chairman of the Beit Aryeh Ofarim Joint House faction, wrote a letter to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett asking him to put an end to the never-ending saga over the Luban Rantis bypass road. Re-completion of the road which has been partially paved and has stood desolate for 16 years.
The Luban Bypass Road is a road that bypasses the village of Luban in western Samaria, it was paved at a cost of about a quarter of a billion shekels and lacks a paved section only about two kilometers long.
The paving of the missing section was budgeted and approved by the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee as early as May 2018 and was transferred for implementation during the period of Transport Minister Miri Regev in December 2019, but in the end the project did not progress to execution.
A car bomb attack near Luban.
4 IDF soldiers injured (archive), Photo: Yossi Zeliger
Israel Today revealed that Luba's inspection with the Ministry of Defense revealed that the money allocated to the project of NIS 76 million was transferred to other projects, partly due to a dispute between the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Transportation over who would bear the costs of defense components.
The amount that is disputed between the two ministries is about NIS 18 million, and meanwhile, residents of the Western Samaria area are forced to travel through the village of Luban and be exposed to terrorist incidents and very heavy traffic loads.
"I appeal to you as the Prime Minister of Israel and as a former resident of Beit Arye who knows the strategic complexity of the area to help and budget the completion of a road bypassing Luban and strengthen the security of all residents of Western Samaria," Luban wrote in a letter to the prime minister.
He said, "It is impossible to come to terms with the current security reality when hundreds of vehicles are stuck in traffic jams inside the white Palestinian village every morning."
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