Hundreds of settlers began a protest march from the West Bank settlement of Beit El to Jerusalem on Monday in protest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to evacuate five buildings in the Ulpana neighborhood.

The marchers are scheduled to arrive on Wednesday at a protest tent outside the High Court of Justice in Jerusalem, where dozens of Ulpana residents are staging a hunger strike. The marchers’ aim is to support two outpost regularization bills scheduled for a Knesset vote on that day.

The marchers, reportedly mostly teenage girls, will stop at the outposts of Migron and Givat Asaf on the way to Jerusalem to express solidarity with the residents of those communities, where numerous homes were also built on private Palestinian land.

Netanyahu presented his plan for the relocation of the residents of the illegal Ulpana neighborhood in Beit El during the weekly Sunday morning cabinet meeting.

The prime minister’s plan is a three-stage one which would move the buildings in question several hundred meters away, reinforce existing settlements by adding homes to them, and eliminate the possibility of future legal challenges. The plan is still pending approval by Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein.

Some 24 protesters have joined the hunger strike, and they and their supporters in the tent outside the Supreme Court feel that Netanyahu’s decision regarding the Ulpana neighborhood is largely inconsequential. Instead they are focused on the outpost regulatory legislation that would retroactively legalize the settlers’ claims to the land. (© 2012 THE TIMES OF ISRAEL 06/04/12)