RAMALLAH, West Bank, 8 November 2007 — The construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank has accelerated even as Israel and the Palestinians work to relaunch the Middle East peace process, a settler watchdog said yesterday.

The construction of settlements “puts the chances of success at the Annapolis meeting in grave danger,” Yariv Oppenheimer, secretary-general of the Israeli Peace Now group told reporters.

“If it continues like this we will soon have a settler state instead of a Palestinian state” in the West Bank, he said.

In a report covering the period from May to October, Peace Now said construction is under way in 88 settlements, ranging from single buildings to the development of hundreds of housing units. Citing government statistics published in June, the group said the number of settlers in the West Bank has reached 267,500, an annual growth of 5.8 percent, versus 1.8 percent growth within Israel during the same period.

“This means that the growth of settlements is much more than the ‘natural growth’ and includes massive migration of settlers to the West Bank,” the report said. But Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, called the numbers “problematic” and insisted that the growth reflects the higher birth rates of settlers, who tend to be ultra-Orthodox Jews.

“This is a new report and we will have to study the report,” Regev told AFP, adding that most of the growth in construction is taking place within well-established settlements.

“Peace Now itself says the bulk of the construction is going on inside the major settlement blocks,” Regev said. “Israel is not building new settlements. We have not been building new settlements in the West Bank for years.” Israel and the Palestinians have been locked in discussions over the past several weeks aimed at preparing a joint document ahead of a US-sponsored international peace meeting expected in Annapolis, Maryland later this year.

The group said that settlers have found a way to bypass the Israeli government’s ban on transporting caravans to the West Bank by assembling them on site instead. According to the report, this new method of transporting construction materials to the settlements and not prefabricated caravans, has allowed the establishment of hundreds of new unauthorized housing units in the past year in Beitar Illit, Ma’ale Adumim, Pisgat Ze’ev and other settlements.

The group’s periodical report further stated that the population growth among settlers was three times higher than that of the population within the Green Line, mainly due to the natural population increase and the relocation of ultra-Orthodox families to the region.

According to Peace Now, the findings of its report indicate that the government continues to violate its commitments as stipulated in the road map for peace — construction in the territories has not been halted and no outposts have been evacuated.

Furthermore, the construction of the police headquarters in the E1 zone near Ma’ale Adumim is nearly completed. Peace Now claims that the construction plan will finalize the isolation of East Jerusalem from the West Bank and divide the Palestinian territory in half, disrupting the territorial contiguity and preventing access to east Jerusalem.

Peace Now’s Director General Yariv Oppenheimer told Israeli Army Radio that dozens of new buildings were being built in illegal outposts which authorities had stopped monitoring. “There is no connection between what is happening in political negotiations and what is happening on the ground. Settlements continue to grow, and more and more caravans are being added to illegal outposts. As far as settlers are concerned there are no political negotiations, there is no Annapolis conference, there is no road map — there is only more and more construction work in settlements.”