On 21 November 2006, the Peace Now Settlement Watch team published a report entitled “One offense begets another” which dealt with the phenomenon of the construction of settlements on private Palestinian land.  The basis for report was the database of the Civil Administration which, to the best of our knowledge, was last updated in 2004, and which Peace Now obtained unofficially.

Reminder:  In 2005, the Peace Now Settlement Watch team officially asked the Civil Administration to provide the information in a systematic manner.  When the request was refused, Peace Now and the Movement for the Freedom of Information appealed to the Court, asking to receive the data.  Two months after the publication of the above report, the Court ruled that the Civil Administration must immediately transmit the database to Peace Now.  The present report is based upon data received pursuant to that ruling, from the spokesperson of the Civil Administration, and it reinforces the findings of Peace Now’s report, “One offense begets another”.

It is important to point out that in an attempt to avoid incriminating itself, the State tried to disguise information which, in the end, it was nevertheless obliged to give to Peace Now.  Therefore, in the GIS layer data which was provided to Peace Now, there is no mention of whether the private land is owned by Palestinians or by Jews.  As a result, the State can claim that the lands were, in fact, acquired by Jews.  Nevertheless, it is highly probable that most of the land that is marked here as private land (if not all of it) is privately-owned Palestinian land.

For the full report - click here

For the report in Haaretz