Illegal Israeli Settlements Go Beyond Boundaries

Majority Of Israeli Settlements Beyond Boundaries, Report Says

Courtesy Of: The International Herald Tribune
By Steven Erlanger
Published: July 6, 2007
IHT

JERUSALEM: Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank use only 12 percent of the land allocated to them, but one-third of the territory they do use lies outside their official jurisdictions, according to a report released Friday by Peace Now, an Israeli group that advocates Palestinian self-determination.

According to the report, based on official data released by the Israeli government following a court order, 90 percent of the settlements sprawl beyond their official boundaries despite the large amount of unused land already allocated to them.

More than 10 percent of the land included within the official jurisdiction of the settlements is owned privately by Palestinians, as is 70 percent of the land the settlements control outside their official boundaries, said the report, whose findings were published Friday in the newspaper Haaretz.

According to Dror Etkes, who prepared the report with Hagit Ofran of Peace Now, the official data show how the government has taken West Bank land beyond the needs of the settlements in order to prevent Palestinian construction there, while seeking to add a zone of separation between the settlers and the Palestinians.

But in areas that have been closed to Palestinians, settlers have seized adjacent Palestinian lands, often privately owned, without being stopped by the army, the legal sovereign in the occupied territories.

There is a pattern of a failure to enforce the law on the settlers," Etkes asserted.

"But the lack of enforcement isn't an accident. It became another tool to achieve the military goals of the occupation, which is to allocate the land and hold it."

The data, updated to the end of 2006, were provided by the Israeli government's Civil Administration, which governs civilian activities in the territories, in response to a lawsuit brought by Peace Now and the Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel.

Until the court case, official maps of the West Bank settlements were not made public.

Shlomo Dror, spokesman for the Israeli military administration in the West Bank, said that many of the failings noted in the report had taken place years ago and had been corrected.

"Today we have better enforcement, the ownership of land is checked and we pursue legal action when necessary," he said.

Etkes responded: "I'm not sure their enforcement is getting better, but their sense of humor is."

Under the Oslo accords of 1993, Israel pledged not to take unilateral steps to alter the situation in the occupied territories before a peace settlement, and it later promised the Bush administration that settlements would not be expanded beyond already "built-up" areas.

But of the 164 settlements, outposts and industrial zones in the West Bank, 92 of them expanded or redefined their area of jurisdiction after the Oslo accords, and in the decade that followed, the number of West Bank settlers doubled.

There are about 122 official Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank as part of a future state.

Much of the international community regards all Israeli settlement in the West Bank, which was captured by Israel in the 1967 war, as illegal under international law; the United States calls the settlements "an obstacle to peace" and wants settlement activity frozen.