Israel accused of stealing land

JERUSALEM -- An Israeli peace group said yesterday that it had obtained government data showing that nearly 40 percent of land covered by Jewish settlements in the West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians, including big portions of blocs that Israel intends to keep under any future peace agreement.

Activists from Peace Now said digital mapping data it obtained indirectly from a government source showed a wide-scale land theft by Israel, which has long asserted that it respects private land ownership in the West Bank.

"What we have here is a mess," said Dror Etkes, a coauthor who heads a Peace Now team that monitors the growth of settlements and their less-formal annexes, known as outposts. He said the data had been compiled by the Civil Administration, the Israeli military authority that deals with Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and passed to Peace Now through a third party.

Etkes said the findings could bolster the group's efforts to challenge the legality of settlement and outpost construction and could complicate any future peace talks over the fate of the settlements. The group urged the state attorney yesterday to investigate possible official wrongdoing and said it would look for ways to employ the findings in its legal battles.

Peace Now is coplaintiff in a petition before Israel's Supreme Court demanding that the government dismantle a four-year-old outpost known as Migron, in the northern West Bank, on grounds it was built on land owned by Palestinians.

In February, Israeli authorities demolished nine houses in an outpost called Amona after the high court ruled they were built illegally on private land.

While Palestinians have long argued that settlers had taken over their land, the Peace Now report marks the first time activists have had such extensive access to government data to make their case. The group said it obtained the data after the government resisted its request for access under freedom-of-information laws.

Israel has said it respects private ownership in the West Bank and has used its authority to declare property as "state land" in cases where it was deemed abandoned or never formally registered. The government also seizes land, on a temporary basis, for security purposes.

Shlomo Dror, spokesman for the Civil Administration, said he had not seen the report and could not comment in detail. But he said the Israeli government had two committees looking into questions related to land ownership in the West Bank, including defining the boundary lines of settlements.

Dror said it has been known that some settlement construction took place on private land, but that the practice had stopped. "In the last few years there is a decision not to build settlements on private Palestinian land," he said.

Emily Amrousi, spokeswoman for the Yesha Council, the main settlers' group in the West Bank, said the government was bound by a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that barred settlement construction on private property that had been seized temporarily for security reasons. "The government of Israel is not a big criminal. It is a legal state, and the state built these settlements," she said.

The Peace Now report relied on mapping data showing the boundaries of areas that were deemed by the government to be privately owned because they were registered before 1968 or recognized by Israel as private under earlier Ottoman law. The group then determined the outlines of each settlement, based on where houses, fences, and roads had been built, and calculated the share that overlapped with the private land.

Overall, the group determined that 15,271 acres, or 38.8 percent of the land covered by settlements and outposts, was privately owned by Palestinians. The largest portion, 54.3 percent, is state land and 1.3 percent is Jewish-owned. About 6 percent is classified as "survey land," whose ownership is unclear.

The report asserts that substantial portions of the largest settlement blocs, which fall inside the separation barrier Israel is building in and around the West Bank, are on private land. For example, the group calculates that 86.4 percent of Maale Adumim, a Jewish suburb of Jerusalem, sits on private land. In Ariel, a key settlement in the northern West Bank, the figure is 35.1 percent.

The group's findings were first reported yesterday by The New York Times.