Israeli Settlements Found To Grow Past Boundaries

Taken from The New York Times, July 7, 2007
By STEVEN ERLANGER

JERUSALEM, July 6 — Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank use only 12 percent of the land allocated to them, but one-third of the territory they do use lies outside of their official jurisdictions, according to a new report released on Friday by Peace Now, an advocacy group.

According to the report, based on official data released by the Israeli government after a court order, 90 percent of the settlements sprawl beyond their official boundaries despite the large amount of unused land already allocated to them.

More than 10 percent of the land included within the official jurisdiction of the settlements is owned privately by Palestinians, as is 70 percent of the land the settlements control outside of their official boundaries, said the report, whose findings were published in Haaretz newspaper on Friday. Peace Now opposes the settlements and tracks them.

Dror Etkes, who prepared the report with Hagit Ofran of Peace Now, said that in his view the official data showed that the government had taken West Bank land beyond the needs of the settlements, possibly to prevent Palestinian construction there and to add a zone of separation between the settlers and the Palestinians.

But once an area is closed to Palestinians, settlers have seized adjacent Palestinian lands, often privately owned, without being stopped by the Israeli Army, which is the legal sovereign in the occupied territories.

“There is a pattern of a failure to enforce the law on the settlers,” Mr. Etkes said. “But the lack of enforcement isn’t an accident. It became another tool to achieve the military goals of the occupation, which is to allocate the land and hold it.”

The data, updated to the end of 2006, were provided by the Israeli government’s Civil Administration, which governs civilian activities in the territories, in response to a lawsuit brought by Peace Now and the Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel. For years, until the court case, official maps of the settlements in the West Bank were not made public.

Shlomo Dror, a spokesman for Israel’s military administration in the West Bank, said that many of the issues noted in the report had taken place years ago and had been corrected. “Today we have better enforcement, the ownership of land is checked and we pursue legal action when necessary,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Etkes responded, “I’m not sure their enforcement is getting better, but their sense of humor is.”

Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel said it would not take unilateral steps to alter the situation in the occupied territories before a peace settlement, and it has promised the Bush administration that settlements would not be expanded beyond already “built up” areas. But of the 164 settlements, outposts and industrial zones in the West Bank, the report says, 92 expanded or redefined their area of jurisdiction after the Oslo Accords, and in the decade that followed the number of West Bank settlers doubled.

There are about 122 official Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, as part of a future state. Much of the world regards all Israeli settlement in the West Bank as illegal under international law; the United States calls the settlements “an obstacle to peace” and wants settlement activity frozen. Israel says it intends to keep three major settlement blocks in the West Bank, together with East Jerusalem.

Largely because of high birthrates, the population of the settlements is increasing at more than 5 percent a year, and promises made by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and reconfirmed by his successor, Ehud Olmert, to destroy illegal outposts built since March 2001 have not been carried out.

In Gaza on Friday, thousands of Palestinians marched in funeral processions for 11 people, including nine Hamas fighters and one fighter from Islamic Jihad, who were killed on Thursday in gun battles after an Israeli incursion. The army said it concluded the operation into central Gaza just after midnight. The army makes raids to question Palestinians about militant activity, including firing rockets into Israel and smuggling weapons, ammunition and money into Gaza. In this case, it arrested about 10 Palestinians and brought them to Israel for further questioning.

In the fighting, Imad Ghanem, a cameraman from Hamas’s television station, Al Aksa, was wounded, and then shot at least twice in the legs as he lay sprawled on the ground. His legs were amputated in the hospital. He was listed in critical condition.

Maj. Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman, said Friday that “many times Hamas takes militants with them and gives them cameras, like this person, who is not in our perspective a regular journalist, but a militant like the others.” She said that he wore no vest identifying him as a journalist, and that at other times, such cameramen had also been armed and used their weapons. She said that in the gunfire, “it was not clear who shot” Mr. Ghanem in the legs.

The International Federation of Journalists on Friday condemned the shooting. “This is a vicious and brutal example of deliberate targeting of a journalist,” said Aidan White, the group’s general secretary. “The Israeli authorities must investigate this case and bring to justice those responsible.”

“This man was carrying a camera, not a gun,” he added. “He was no threat to Israeli forces.”
Major Leibovich said no investigation had been ordered.

On Friday, Israeli troops operating in northern Gaza, near Beit Hanun, captured eight Qassam rocket launchers with their operating systems. One of the launchers had a rocket attached that was ready to fire.