Israel issues more than 1,150 land seizure orders since 1969 in the West Bank

Israeli occupation authorities have issued more than 1,150 land seizure orders in the West Bank since 1969, according to a new study reported on by Haaretz. 

Authored by veteran settlement researcher Dror Etkes, the new study “focuses on the history of orders to seize Palestinian land, issued by generations of army commanders in the West Bank (not including the part that was annexed to Jerusalem).”

Etkes found that 1,150 seizure orders have been issued from 1969 to the present. “After subtracting those that were revoked or that overlap”, the report noted, “it turns out that this particular trick enabled Israel to take over more than 100,000 dunams (25,000 acres) of Palestinian land”.

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“More millions of dunams of Palestinian land have been stolen in other ways, which Etkes has been researching too,” Haaretz added.

The website of Israel’s Military Advocate General, the body that advises the army on legal issues, stresses that the purpose of such seizure is “security and military needs”.

However, the study found, some 40 per cent of the area “officially seized for military and security needs have been allocated over the years to settlements”, all of which are illegal under international law. A quarter is occupied by the Separation Wall, and a quarter is used for “military purposes”.

It was the Labor Party’s predecessor which “started this tradition”, Haaretz noted: “They allocated 6,280 dunams to settlements – 28 per cent of the approximately 22,000 dunams that have been seized for military use in those years”.

Subsequently, “from Likud’s victory in May 1977 to the end of 1979, more than 31,000 dunams were seized. Out of this total, 23,000 were allocated to settlements – that is, 73 per cent.”

Etkes also examined how Israeli occupation authorities have colonised the occupied territory by declaring Palestinian land to be so-called “state land”.

Based on official data, Etkes “estimates that since the 1980s, Israel has declared some 750,000 dunams as state land, out of approximately 5.7 million dunams in the West Bank.”

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