Mobile homes (Illustration photo) Photo: Gil Nechushtan
Students to make room for evacuees
How to solve the housing woes of 500 Gush Katif families? Transfer them to lavish student dorms at Ariel College in West Bank. And what about the students? No problem, move them to the neglected dorms, where the walls are leaking – on a two-day notice
I made the wilderness blossom and now I'm being expelled - surprisingly, those words were not uttered by a disgruntled Gaza Strip evacuee, but rather, by Sergey Haikin, a student at the Ariel College in the West Bank, after he was informed he must immediately leave his dorm room to make room for Gush Katif evacuees.
Haikin, who has been living at the mobile home for three years with his wife, must now move to a dilapidated, neglected dorm room at another
area, all as part of plans to absorb 500 evacuated Gaza Strip families at the more lavish dorms.
Overall, hundreds of students who reside in mobile homes, some of them with families, will be removed from their student dorms on Sunday. The students received a two-day notice before the move. They were also told they will have to move to a new area of dorms that has no vegetation, with mobile homes that require extensive renovation.
"They called me and informed me I must leave my mobile home until Sunday morning," student Vitali Hanin, who has been living at the dorms, told Ynet. "I got angry but it didn't help. I was told the decision comes from high-ranking officials and nothing can be done. I'll be forced to leave."
The students are to be evacuated from the two-people mobile homes, despite their claims that the college has additional larger rooms vacant.
Student: We have nowhere else to go
The dorm rooms serve as their permanent homes, where they live throughout the year. About 1,000 students reside in the dormitories during the summer, with 3,000 during the school year.
"I'm against the disengagement and feel as if I am being evacuated like those who have been evacuated from there (Gush Katif)," Haikin said. "Our parents do not live in the country. We have nowhere else to go. If they would have told us two months ago, we would have had enough time to rent an apartment."
Hailkan said the problem with moving to a different room is that the mobile homes are very old.
"My wife and I renovated our home - we painted it and organized everything from the closets to the electrical appliances. Now they are forcing us to evacuate from our homes to an area that is not as good and in a dilapidated state," he said.
The question that remains is whether the college administration took into account the size of the two-people mobile homes - most families from Gush Katif have several children.
Each mobile home is made up of two 21 square-meter apartments, each with its own entrance.
"The college administration's objective is to separate the parents from their children, so that the parents would live in one mobile home and the children would live in another one nearby," Hanin said. "It will only harm them and cause additional problems."
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