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JERUSALEM - Almost 40 per cent of the land used by Israel for its settlements in the occupied West Bank is the private property of Palestinians, the Israeli organisation Peace Now said yesterday on the basis of leaked official maps and other data.
Contrary to official claims that the land used for settlements is state-owned and that private property is only seized temporarily for security reasons, the leak shows that privately owned Palestinian land has been repeatedly used to build and expand settlements.
The potential embarrassment to Israel of the disclosure is all the greater because it suggests that the use of Palestinian private land is especially prevalent in some of the Jewish settlements which successive Israeli governments have made clear they are determined to keep in any final peace deal.
For example, Peace Now say the leaked data for the largest settlement of all those built on territory occupied in the 1967 Six Day War Ma'ale Adumim, to the east of Jerusalem, indicates that the total amount of privately owned Palestinian land accounts for 86.4 per cent.
The settlement is one of the "major population centres" which President Bush conceded in 2004 would remain in Israel in any "final status" settlement.
Peace Now says the disclosure demonstrates that "in addition to ignoring international laws and agreements, Israel has violated its own norms and laws in the West Bank through the confiscation of private Palestinian property and the building of settlements upon them."
Peace Now says that detailed digital maps showing showing that 60,000 dunums of privately owned Palestinian lands - or 15,000 acres - have been used in the settlements, was leaked from within the Israeli military's Civil Administration, which runs the West Bank.
Charging that "the property rights of many Palestinians have been systematically violated in the course of settlement building," the report says the data was used by Talia Sasson, the lawyer charged by the then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to report on illegal settlement outposts last year.
Ms Sasson said in her report that the use of private Palestinian property for outpost construction could in some circumstances be a "felony", contravened a "basic right" of possession defined by the Israeli Supreme Court as a "constitutional right."
She added that "there was no way to validate the establishment of an outpost on private Palestinian property" and such outposts must be "evacuated the sooner the better."
Dror Etkes, director of Peace Now's settlement watch programme said yesterday that the same legal considerations equally applied in the case of the settlements themselves.
He added that Israel was conducting itself in the West Bank as a "Mafia state when it comes to private Palestinian property, taking, stealing, land from the Palestinians not only as a collective but as individuals." .
The Civil Administration did not dispute that some private land had been used in the past for settlements but insisted that it did not have such figures as those produced by Peace Now.
The Civil Administration has been resisting a legal case brought by Peace Now to release such information officially under the Israeli Freedom of Information Act.
Explaining its refusal, the State argued that the demand for disclosure was "a complex and most sensitive issue, where.....security considerations and foreign relations aspects of the State of Israel are concerned." The private land was either registered by its Palestinian owners under British rule before 1948 or Jordanian rule before 1968, or recognised under Ottoman law, never revoked, because it had been cultivated by the same family for at least ten years.
The disclosures could trigger the possibility not only of fresh international pressure over settlements but also that of legal actions by Palestinian landowners for recovery of their property.
Peace Now and agroup of Palestinian owners are pursuing a High Court case for the evacuation of the Migron outpost, on the grounds that it was constructed on 100 per cent private Palestinian land.
Mr Etkes predicted that the case would succeed and if so would be a "very interesting development."
Shlomo Dror, for the Civil Adminstration, said that the practice of building on privately owned Palestinian land has stopped in "1997 or1998" and that much of the material had been published in Ms Sasson's report.
He said officials had been examining the report on the Peace Now website and added: "We don't have the figures they have.
It is not always easy to say what is privately owned land and what isn't, particularly when there is no documentation.
We have a 'blue line' committee which has been looking at these issues of ownership for about three years and is still working."
- INDEPENDENT
