RAMALLAH/JERUSALEM, 22 February 2007 — Israel is building more than 3,000 homes in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank despite a commitment under a US-backed peace plan to stop such expansion, the Peace Now group said in a report yesterday. In its annual report, the anti-settlement watchdog said there had been fewer housing starts in 2006 than in 2005, and that the number of settlements had not grown, although their population had increased over the year by 5 percent.
The number of Israeli settlers living in West Bank settlements has risen five percent in the last year, according to the report. The report stated that the Israeli Interior Ministry figures showed 268,000 settlers residing in West Bank settlements in 2006 — a five-percent increase from 2005. In reality, the report said, the growth rate of the settler population remains steady at three times the rate in Israel proper. The number of settlements themselves, meanwhile, has not changed in the past year, standing at 121, the study said.
The organization attributed the population increase to “the movement of Ultra-Orthodox families to like-minded areas in the occupied territories, and the large birth rate, which have turned places like Modi’in Illit and Beitar Illit into the largest (Israeli) settlements in the West Bank.”
The report says that approximately 2,000 Israeli settlers are currently living at 102 settlement outposts in the West Bank. In 2006, the first year of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s term, no new outposts were established, but building in the existing outposts continued at a pace similar to that of 2005. Of the changes that took place at the outposts in 2006, 80 percent were carried out in locations east of the West Bank separation wall.
Even so, the majority of the expansion and construction work was carried out before March 2001. The report identified expansion in 27 of the outposts founded since March 2001. The government of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on several occasions to evacuate the outposts but neither Sharon nor his successor Olmert evacuated them. The report indicates that in 2006 a total of 952 tenders were published for construction contracts in occupied West Bank, all of these were published post general Israeli elections in March 2006. In comparison in 2005 there were a total of 1184 tenders published.
