Amendment 116 to the Planning and Construction Law replaced Chapter 10 of the law dealing with supervision, enforcement and punishment for construction offenses. The amendment aims to upgrade the powers of the local authority and the national unit for the enforcement of planning and construction laws (a body established for this purpose) and thus reduce illegal construction or use.
The initiative to amend the law follows statements by the courts over the years and an overall opinion of the government authorities that violations of the planning and construction law are among the most common violations. In February 2015, a team headed by the deputy ombudsman (Erez Kaminitz) was appointed to examine the phenomenon and in January 2016, the team's report was published. In Government Decision No. 1559, they decided to accept the report's recommendations and make legislative amendments.
A central part of upgrading the powers was expressed in the amendment Administrative Offenses Law, 1985, which stated that offenses according to the Planning and Construction Law will be classified as administrative offenses. The meaning of the classification, which municipal inspectors can on their own impose high fines (from tens to hundreds of thousands of shekels) and be a key factor in issuing administrative orders for demolition or prohibition of use, without requiring court proceedings.
An administrative demolition order is an order that issues permission to immediately carry out the demolition of a work that in the authority's opinion is prohibited by law. This is a drastic and sometimes disproportionate tool that can lead to the destruction of a person's private property based on the sole opinion of the authorities without the move being reviewed by the court. Property right Defined as a fundamental right in the legal system in Israel.
Moreover, if in the past in order to issue an administrative demolition order it was necessary to receive an affidavit from an engineer and a local committee on the basis of which the chairman of a local committee (in many cases the mayor) could issue an administrative demolition order, today it is required to receive an affidavit from an inspector (even a junior) on the basis of which he can engineer to issue the order.
In a recent case in Tel Aviv, a man's office was destroyed, which the municipal inspector thought was the division of a property into residential apartments. It was a property that was used for trading for 60 years without any claim from the authorities regarding the use of the property. According to findings recently published in the newspaper The Marker, there are about ten thousand properties in Tel Aviv in the same status that have not yet been settled and are currently at the potential for demolition.
And it is not without reason that many criticisms have been heard since the repair. Most of the criticisms come from among the Arab population and the agricultural settlements where there are many buildings that have not yet been regulated from a planning point of view.
The great absurdity, that in Government Resolution No. 1559 they talked on the one hand about finding housing solutions for the Arab sector, promoting planning in the Arab sector and determining the possibility of providing quantitative relief for the built, but on the other hand they qualified a tool that allows a soft hand for the demolition of buildings that have not yet been planned according to planning all over the country.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke out more than once during 2019 against Amendment 116, and recently spoke before the Israel Agriculture Conference and said:We need to amend Article 116. I know, it's not meant to bother you, it's meant to help you and that's how it will be"
It remains to be seen what will happen to the repair...
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