Report: Israeli settlements exceed boundaries
One third of occupied Israeli territory lies outside of their legally allocated land.
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. This according to a new report released today byPeace Now, a dovish advocacy group.
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 today in the Haaretz newspaper.
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 and to add a zone of separation between the settlers and the Palestinians.
But once an area is closed to Palestinians, settlers have seized adjacent Palestinian lands, often privately owned, without being stopped by the army, which is the legal sovereign in the occupied territories.
“There is a pattern of a failure to enforce the law on the settlers,” Mr. 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, was provided officially 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. For years, until the court case, official maps of the settlements in the West Bank were not made public.
Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel said it would not take unilateral steps to alter the situation in the occupied territories before a peace settlement, and it has 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 some 122 official Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, as part of a future state. Much of the international community regards all Israeli settlement in the West Bank as illegal under international law; the United States calls the settlements “an obstacle to peace” and wants settlement activity frozen. Israel says it intends to keep three major settlement blocks in the West Bank, together with East Jerusalem.
Largely because of high birth rates, the population of the settlements is increasing at more than 5 percent a year, and promises made by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and reconfirmed by his successor, Ehud Olmert, to destroy illegal outposts built since March 2000 have not been carried out.
nytimes
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