The courts had the last word this weekend. The Jerusalem District Court threw out the petition against the “Burj Khalifa” tower planned near Mount Herzl, and in a separate case it threw out the petition against two towers at the Jaffa and King George junction, charging those petitioners NIS 75,000 in costs. A third Jerusalem project, 240 homes in Gilo, won final approval from the district planning committee. Down south, the national housing committee cleared a whole new district for deposit in Kiryat Gat: about 11,000 homes. In Rehovot, the Weizmann Institute got final approval to replace a 36-unit dorm with 805 student homes. And the 11th “Dira BeHanacha” lottery sent out its real win notices on Sunday: 7,922 winning households, about 60% of them army reservists. By our own math, a registered reservist had about a 1 in 5 chance of winning. Everyone else had about 1 in 28.
Two rulings, five towers: Jerusalem’s high-rise push wins its week in court
Two separate petitions tried to stop two of Jerusalem’s biggest tower projects. Both just failed.
The first case is the “Epstein compound” in Kiryat HaYovel, nicknamed Jerusalem’s “Burj Khalifa” because its architects, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, designed the real one in Dubai. The plan puts a 42-story tower with 240 homes and hotel floors on about 7 dunams near the light rail. A dunam is 1,000 square meters, about a quarter acre. Thirty-five residents and city council members petitioned against it. They argued the tower would loom over the Mount Herzl military cemetery, Yad Vashem, and the Ein Kerem valley. On July 28, Judge Arnon Darel rejected the petition. He wrote that he does not dismiss the bereaved families’ pain, but the choice between planning options belongs to the planning bodies, not the court. The full ruling is public (judgment PDF; coverage in Ynet and Merkaz HaNadlan, July 29).
The second case is the “Kukia compound” at the Jaffa and King George junction, the busiest corner of the city center. The approved plan there: two residential towers of 20 and 35 floors above a five-floor base of shops, offices and hotel space, also on about 7 dunams, next to two light-rail lines and a planned heavy-rail station. Petitioners claimed the approval rested on “extraneous considerations” and that the height, far above the old 10 to 12 floor guidance for the area, was a “meteoric bungee jump.” Judge Nimrod Flax rejected every claim last week and ordered the petitioners to pay NIS 75,000 in costs, NIS 25,000 to each group of respondents (judgment PDF; Merkaz HaNadlan, August 2; TheMarker, August 2).
The same week, the Jerusalem district committee gave final approval to a third tower project: the Odem compound in Gilo. A four-story building with 48 flats will come down, and two towers of 36 and 29 floors with about 240 homes will go up on the light-rail corridor (Bizzness, July 30; Merkaz HaNadlan, August 2).
Our own math, from the plan documents above: the two court-cleared compounds hold at least 240 homes on 14 dunams combined, with the Epstein tower alone packing about 34 homes per dunam. The Gilo approval multiplies the homes on its lot five times over, 240 where 48 stand today. The unit count for the Kukia towers has not been published.
Why it matters: every path to stopping these towers in court has now failed, and one group of objectors paid for trying. If you own an older flat near a Jerusalem light-rail line, the planning system and now the courts are firmly behind tall, dense rebuilds there. The rulings landed July 28 and late last week; the press caught up on August 2.
Kiryat Gat lines up a district of 11,000 homes
The national committee for preferred housing sites (the Vatmal, a fast-track planning body) approved the “Carmei Gat East” district plan for deposit in late July. Deposit means the plan is now published for public objections before final approval. It is one of the largest single plans in Israel right now: about 11,000 homes in northeast Kiryat Gat, plus hundreds of thousands of square meters of shops and workplaces and a new transport center. The plan comes from the Israel Land Authority together with the city, under the umbrella agreement they signed about a year ago. Six bridges and crossings will tie the new district to Carmei Gat over the railway, with new entrances from Roads 35, 6 and 353, and most homes within walking distance of a planned “Kiryat Gat North” rail station (Israel Hayom, August 2; the city’s own announcement confirms the approval).
Why it matters: Kiryat Gat is already one of the cheapest places where Anglo buyers can get a new family home near a fast train. A deposited 11,000-home plan means years of supply behind the current Carmei Gat market, which cuts the case for overpaying there now. Our Carmei Gat community guide covers the area today, and our report on the state flooding the south with land explains the wider push this plan belongs to.
805 student homes where 36 stand: the Weizmann dorm plan is final
The Central District planning committee gave final approval last week to the Weizmann Institute’s dorm plan in Rehovot, first reported after the committee’s announcement on August 2. The old 36-unit “Sami Cohen” dorm will be demolished. In its place: 805 housing units for students, researchers and staff, in four buildings. Two are 25-story towers along Herzl Street above a commercial floor, and two are mid-rise buildings of 6 to 16 floors behind them, with about 900 square meters of shops facing the street. The site sits next to the Rehovot train station and the planned “Weizmann Institute” metro stop (Merkaz HaNadlan, August 2; news08, August 2).
That is 22 times the housing the site holds today, by our count (805 planned units against 36 existing ones). Why it matters: hundreds of Weizmann students and visiting researchers currently rent in Rehovot’s regular market. Moving them into campus towers over the next few years should ease pressure on the city’s small-flat rentals, something local landlords should price into long-term plans.
Givatayim’s northwest gets a rulebook, not a bulldozer
The Tel Aviv district committee approved a policy document for northwest Givatayim, the sought-after edge of the city next to Tel Aviv’s job centers, around Katznelson and Aliyat HaNoar streets. Be clear about the stage: a policy document is a set of principles for judging future projects. It grants no building rights and no permits. It exists because in January the committee ordered the city’s original renewal plan for the quarter re-examined, and this is the interim answer: developers and owners can now bring individual projects that fit the rules instead of waiting years for one giant plan. The district planner called it “a planning horizon for the interim period” (news08, August 2; the Planning Administration flagged the approval and its planner’s interview).
Why it matters: if you own an older flat in northwest Givatayim, the years of total uncertainty just narrowed. Projects can move again, one lot at a time. But nobody’s building tomorrow morning, and any developer who tells you otherwise is selling.
A supermarket signs for 25 years in Nesher
Yohananof signed a 25-year lease for a 5,500 square meter flagship store in the Colmobil group’s new commercial compound in Nesher, next to Haifa, as the roughly NIS 100 million project moves into its second phase (ice, August 2; Maariv, August 3). A 25-year anchor commitment is a strong sign of retail confidence in the Haifa metro’s eastern suburbs. Why it matters: anchor tenants like this usually arrive ahead of housing demand, worth noting if you are weighing the Nesher and Krayot area for a rental purchase.
For the site’s editors: four updates, no new pages
Four stories today belong to beats the site already owns. Update the existing posts, do not write new ones.
- Lottery results are real now. On Housing Lottery “Results” Leak. Ministry: Not Real (ID 84599), add: “Update, August 3: the real win notices went out Sunday morning, August 2. The ministry says 7,922 households won homes in 19 towns, and about 60% of the winners are army reservists.” Sources: the Housing Ministry announcement, Bizportal, August 2. Our derivation, if wanted: 4,734 of 25,394 registered reservists won (about 1 in 5); the other 3,188 winners came from roughly 89,000 non-reservist households (about 1 in 28).
- The never-opened tenders moved. On Tenders for 3,091 Israeli Homes Never Opened for Bids (ID 84603), add: “Update, August 3: the Land Authority rescheduled two of the never-opened tenders on August 2 (Netanya 98/2026 now opens September 16, Lehavim 162/2026 opens August 31). Nine tenders for 1,213 homes remain closed to bidders. Karmiel 147/2026 closes August 5 and has still never opened, and the 1,260-home Ashkelon Golf tender is five days past its opening date with no tender booklet.” Source: Land Authority tender records, August 3.
- August’s first cancellation. On 5,300 Homes Vanished From Israel’s Land Tenders in July (ID 84584), add: “August began the same way: on August 2 the Land Authority cancelled tender 362/2025 in Lehavim, 88 homes, the same morning it postponed the town’s other tender.”
- The Treasury sees more cancellations coming. On The 80% Bill Comes Due for Israel’s Paper Buyers (ID 84397), add: “The Finance Ministry’s deputy chief economist, Galit Ben Naim, says deal cancellations are no longer a fringe event, and a new official review is due soon. Only about a quarter of the flats bought in the 10/90 promotion era have reached their delivery date so far (ice, August 2).”
Two pending Google Docs also gained new facts: the G City section in the August 1 doc (Katzman’s lawyers sent a letter putting the control sale in question, Globes, August 2), and the Avisror section in the July 31 and August 1 docs (the raise closed at NIS 525 million from institutions at about NIS 2.05 billion pre-money, with a NIS 160 million dividend to the owners, Merkaz HaNadlan, August 2). Fold these in if those docs get published.
Watch for tomorrow: the Supreme Court ruled that holdout owners must join their building’s TAMA 38 project (Merkaz HaNadlan, published 07:00 today, seconds outside this brief’s window, single source so far). Also: 17 land tenders formally opened today, including Efrat (694 homes), Kiryat Ata (799) and Umm al-Fahm (689), but only 3 had bid booklets this morning. And Calcalist reports the Yokneam hotel project ended in NIS 50 million of debt, one source so far.
Checked today and not shipped
The sweep logged about 370 raw items and 52 distinct stories. Most died in checking, the usual reasons: already told on the site or in a pending doc, recycled old news, one source only, or off-beat. The notable kills: the lottery rule-change story (our August 2 doc already tells it), the Kiryat Bialik 1,200-home rejection and Haifa’s Grand Kanyon tower (both in the July 30 brief), the Kiryat Eliezer 667-unit approval (the site has owned that beat since January, IDs 59965 and 60183), the Beit HaKerem owners suing a judge (August 1 doc), the Jerusalem penthouse record (August 2 doc), and a News1 piece on the Land Authority director’s appointment that read as fresh but carried a May 4 decision date in its own body, a saga the site already covered in May and June (IDs 63961 and 83879). A Globes exclusive on Israelis holding nine or more flats stayed paywalled with no second source, so its numbers could not be checked and it was dropped. Single-source local items (a Herzliya rebuild approval, Ramat HaSharon demolitions, an Or Akiva rent spat, a 437-unit Tel Aviv corner, Ashkelon’s 42,500-unit renewal mapping, a brokers’ rent report) were all logged and held.
Sources
Jerusalem District Court ruling, Epstein compound (PDF) · Jerusalem District Court ruling, Kukia compound (PDF) · Ynet · Merkaz HaNadlan (Epstein) · Merkaz HaNadlan (Kukia) · TheMarker · Merkaz HaNadlan (Gilo) · Bizzness · Israel Hayom · Kiryat Gat Municipality · Merkaz HaNadlan (Weizmann) · news08 (Weizmann) · news08 (Givatayim) · Planning Administration · ice (Nesher) · Maariv · Housing Ministry · Bizportal · Israel Land Authority tender 362/2025 · ice (Treasury) · Globes · Merkaz HaNadlan (Avisror) · Merkaz HaNadlan (TAMA 38 ruling)
