JERUSALEM, 25 October 2006 — Jewish settlements are expanding in the occupied West Bank despite the building freeze demanded by a US-led peace plan and sometimes in defiance of Israeli law, a paper said yesterday citing a government report. The left-leaning Haaretz daily said the findings came from a secret two-year study that came across what the newspaper called “rampant construction.” The report accused some unnamed Israeli officials of intentionally deleting records from a settlement database in order to conceal the scale of the expansion.
“Construction there has been ongoing for years, in blatant violation of the law,” the paper quoted the report as saying. Israel undertook to freeze settlement growth and dismantle unauthorized settler outposts as part of a “road map” for peace with the Palestinians that neither side has done much to follow and which has been undermined by violence.
Although Israel says it has the right to continue building inside existing settlements, Haaretz said construction had often been beyond the settlement boundaries and sometimes on privately owned Palestinian land.
Palestinians seek a state in the West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip, territories Israel captured from Jordan and Egypt in the 1967 Middle East war. The World Court brands all the settlements illegal, though Israel disputes that. A Defense Ministry spokeswoman, asked about the Haaretz report, confirmed that a settlement study exists but denied to discuss its contents or the allegation that the construction database had been tampered with by government employees. “This matter has been classified as secret, because it has yet to be submitted to the government. When the time comes, the appropriate parts will be published,” the spokeswoman said.
The umbrella settler council Yesha had no immediate comment. Haaretz did not give figures for the reported settlement expansions. Settlement watchdog group Peace Now said tenders for 952 new settlement homes were issued in the first eight months of August this year, a rate close to that of 2005.
Peace Now also cited a Defense Ministry decision to expand the boundaries of four West Bank settlements last May. According to the watchdog group, the ministry decided to rescind that decision but has not yet done so.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was elected in March on a platform that included removing small settlements to strengthen the biggest, but the project was shelved after this summer’s war with Lebanese Hezbollah.
Washington has said Israel could expect to keep some settlements under any eventual peace deal, but has repeatedly demanded respect for the road map. A US embassy spokesman, Stewart Tuttle, declined comment on the Haaretz report. “If there are issues with enforcement of particular road map commitments, those are things that we bring up with the Israelis in private diplomatic interchange,” Tuttle said. Palestinians have failed to meet their road map commitment to start disarming gunmen, a prospect that looks even less likely since Hamas won elections in January.
Defense Minister Amir Peretz has repeatedly vowed a crackdown on settler outposts built without Israeli authorization. According to Peace Now, there are currently 101 outposts, down from the 107 identified by a government study last year. But the group said settlers had now begun laying infrastructure such as roads and utilities at 43 of the outposts. The Israeli Interior Ministry’s last annual census, in June, found that the West Bank settler population had grown by 5.3 percent to 278,150. Some 2.4 million Palestinians live in the West Bank.
