Israeli settlements breach boundaries

The Baltimore Sun

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 new report released yesterday by Peace Now, a dovish advocacy group.

According to the report, based on official data released by the Israeli government after 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 yesterday 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," 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 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.

Shlomo Dror, spokesman for Israel's 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."

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