The Big Bloc: 1,892 Owners, Fifty Years, One Court Ruling

HaGush HaGadol (הגוש הגדול, the Big Bloc) is the famous cluster of privately owned parcels that sat inside the Sde Dov airfield. The land was bought by families generations before Tel Aviv grew around the runway. When the government traded the airport for housing in 2010 and 2012, those owners did not disappear. They became a statutory problem sitting under a 16,000-home program.

The site's own glossary puts the count at 1,892 private owners. Their rights were fractional, overlapping, and tied to cadastral records that rarely appear in glossy brochures. A RAMI tender sells a clean migrash (מגרש, numbered planning lot) to one winning bidder. The Big Bloc required a court to divide entitlements among nearly two thousand parties before anyone could treat the land like a normal development site.

Land-rights appeals against the detailed plans were one reason the September 2024 mega-tender for about 7,100 Central and North units was postponed repeatedly into 2025, alongside a separate wind-regime appeal. Private ownership was not a footnote in the planning file. It was a delay mechanism with a body count measured in owners, not months.

Three Eshkol residential lots are private land, and they are three different stories. Lot 102 is the Big Bloc's: its design plan names the court-appointed managers of the Big Bloc as the owner. Lot 105 belongs to about 200 private owners who organised to build it themselves, with a project manager rather than a developer. Lot 108's design plan names a separate private owner group as developer and owner. None of the three was in the August 2021 RAMI wave that produced ASHIRA, RAINBOW and the record ₪4.4 billion close, and each follows its own legal path: owners building for themselves, or combination deals (עסקת קומבינציה) where owners take finished apartments instead of a cash land price.

Lot 105 received a design plan (tochnit itzuv, תוכנית עיצוב) approval in April 2024, the earliest of the three on the public record. Lots 102 and 108 received design-plan approvals in January 2025, reported together with one additional lot in a "peek at the future" article on 14 January 2025. None of the three had a named consumer-facing project as of September 2026.

Together the three lots account for 1,146 homes in the approved designs: 365 on lot 102, 372 on lot 105, and 409 on lot 108. That is more than a fifth of the Eshkol complex's 4,844 homes, sitting on land the state never auctioned.

On 17 September 2025, district records show a historic milestone: a court settled the division of private lands and approved the rights table for 1,892 owners of the Big Bloc. The article called it a ruling on how to split entitlements that had blocked coherent development for decades.

The decision did not hand any single developer a turnkey lot. It established how fractional owners map onto the planning lots the municipality had already drawn, which Calcalist reported as allocations in Eshkol, in another complex and in the neighbouring plan TA/3700. That is the difference between a court victory and a building permit. The design plan for lot 102 could move through committee because the architectural mass was already drawn. The rights table told the market who would get paid, and in what form, when that mass is built.

Mega-tender delays in late 2024 and early 2025 had already shown how land-rights uncertainty freezes capital. Central and North state-land tenders could close in February and March 2025 once separate appeals were rejected; the Big Bloc's clock took longer. And the certainty did not last a year: on 30 August 2026 the court ruled that the lottery allocating specific compounds among the private owners must not go ahead for now, because contamination, clean-up cost and delay may differ between compounds and skew their values.

Financing private land is not the same as paying RAMI. On 6 August 2025, district records show that Barkat Capital provided ₪1.153 billion in financing to 203 private landowners in Eshkol. They are the owners of lot 105, a group separate from the Big Bloc's 1,892, and the facility lets them build the lot themselves rather than hand it to a developer.

In a combination deal the landowner's return is apartments in the finished buildings, not a cheque at closing. That means the landowner needs bridge finance against future units while towers are designed, permitted, and built. Barkat's line is the kind of institutional backstop that turns paper rights into a balance sheet a bank will recognise.

Compare that to ASHIRA on lot 101, a RAMI winner that secured more than ₪2.5 billion in construction financing from Mizrahi-Tefahot and First International in January 2026. Same district, different counterparty structure. ASHIRA's risk sits with a named developer and named banks. Private lots sit with landowner groups, a financier like Barkat, and in some cases a developer that negotiates combination terms.

Private land has a fourth Eshkol lot. In March 2025 Dan Real Estate won the owners' tender for lot 104: 260 homes plus 300 square metres of retail, paying about ₪100 million in cash and 55 per cent of the homes to the owners. Calcalist put the deal at about ₪600 million and Nadlan Center at about half a billion shekels. Dan beat Chen & Itai Gindi, Electra, Azorim and Zemach Hammerman.

That deal shows what happens after rights are clear: a competitive process among major developers, a published price, and a defined unit count. Lot 102, the Big Bloc's, is earlier on the curve: rights table September 2025, design plan January 2025, no developer or marketing name, and since August 2026 an allocation lottery frozen by a court.

A site post titled "Private investors in Sde Dov: 'We didn't really believe…'" sits in district records archive, a reminder that local buyers treated these parcels as speculative for years. The court ruling and the financing line are the evidence that belief is shifting from folklore to contracts.

If you are comparing ASHIRA or RAINBOW to a future tower on a private lot, start with the counterparty. On a RAMI plot you contract with a single developer who won a public tender at a published land price. On a private plot you are downstream of a landowner group, possibly a combination agreement, and possibly a financier like Barkat. Ask who holds the development agreement, and on lot 102 whether the Big Bloc's rights table and the frozen lottery affect the specific migrash you are buying into.

Second, check the permit clock. RAMI winners in 2021 are already under construction or permitted: Rainbow received the district's first excavation permit in March 2024; Ashira received a full building permit in March 2026. Lot 105's owners have construction finance and are building; lots 102 and 108 have design plans but no named project and no building permit as of September 2026. Design approval is a gate opened. It is not a tower under way.

Third, price the risk premium honestly. State-land winners in February 2025 paid roughly 40 percent less per home than the 2021 record, per Ynet's Central-tender coverage. Private-land deals will price land differently again, often through in-kind units rather than a transparent per-square-metre land line. The September 2025 ruling and the Barkat facility reduce legal uncertainty. They do not guarantee the same delivery date or developer brand as a lot that already has a cornerstone and bank financing.