Israeli Group Charges Settler 'Land Grab'

Says 40% Of West Bank Jewish Towns Built On Private Palestinian Land

(CBS/AP)  Forty percent of all West Bank settlements were built on private Palestinian land and are therefore illegal, a settlement watchdog group said Tuesday, basing its claims on data provided by Israel's military.

"We are talking about an institutional land grab," said Dror Etkes, a settlement expert with the Peace Now group.

Etkes said Peace Now's claims were based on data the court ordered the military to provide. The group has forwarded the information to Attorney General Meni Mazuz, asking him to take immediate action against the illegal land seizures.

Israel claims that the settlements are built on state land and not on private property, reports CBS News correspondent Robert Berger.

In other developments:

Israel's Supreme Court has ordered the government to recognize same-sex marriages performed abroad, reports Berger. The decision sent shock waves through the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate that has a monopoly on marriage and divorce. One religious member of parliament, Moshe Gafni, said, "This is not a Jewish state, it's Sodom and Gomorrah," referring to two cities the Bible said was destroyed because their citizens were so sinful.

Prominent anti-Syrian Christian politician Pierre Gemayel was assassinated in a suburb of Beirut on Tuesday, his Phalange Party Voice of Lebanon radio station reported. The shooting will certainly heighten the political tension in Lebanon. Gemayel was a supporter of the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority, which is locked in a power struggle with pro-Syrian factions led by Hezbollah.

Two Italian aid workers were kidnapped in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, Palestinian officials said, the latest in a string of abductions of foreigners in the lawless area. The officials said the Italian, both employees of the Red Cross, were captured in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

In the Gaza Strip, Israeli troops killed a top Hamas commander in the latest military operation against Palestinian rocket squads, as troops operated in two areas of northern Gaza. A 70-year-old woman was also killed in the battle.

Palestinian rockets crashed into the Israeli town of Sderot on the Gaza border during a visit by the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour. "Suddenly, there were two loud explosions. One of those explosions was approximately 200 yards away from where we were with the high commissioner," UN spokesman Chris Gunness said. An Israeli was critically injured. Berger reports Israeli officials said it's good that the U.N. official got a first-hand look at the intolerable situation in Sderot.

It's a box office hit in America, but in Israel, it's facing censorship before it even opens. It's not the anti-Semitic jokes in the hit movie "Borat" that got the attention of Israeli censors, reports Berger. Rather, it's the racy advertising. Posters showing comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in skimpy underwear were banned amid objections from ultra-Orthodox Jews who charged that it violated decency laws. So advertisers printed new posters, featuring the star in his trademark — and more modest — suit.

Peace Now's report singles out the two largest settlements. It says that more than 86 percent of Ma'ale Adumim, a community of 30,000 people outside Jerusalem, is built on Palestinian land, and more than 35 percent of Ariel.

The group says that the report "demonstrates that the property rights of many Palestinians have been systematically violated in the course of settlement building."

"We are talking about an institutional land grab," said Dror Etkes, a settlement expert with the Peace Now group.

Emily Amrusi, a spokeswoman for the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, dismissed the report.

"There is nothing to it," she told the Jerusalem Post. "It's just another lie to attack the settlement movement."

"In the war of Peace Now against the Jews, everything is kosher," Amrusi added.

A government spokesman said he could not comment on the data without studying it, but said that sometimes Palestinians would sell land to Israelis but be unwilling to admit to the sale publicly because they feared retribution as collaborators.

"I'm not sure that all the land Peace Now says is Palestinian, is Palestinian," Civil Administration spokesman Shlomo Dror said.

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©MMVI CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Add a Comment

by agnim November 21, 2006 6:43 PM EST

Exactly!

The US is in an unholy alliance with the evil israeli ethnic cleansing and the state terrorism used to enforce it.

Instead of funding the Middle East madness, the US could have taken the high road and help those miserable Semites all find common ground.

First it was their jehovah who helped them with the first ethnic cleansing coming out of Egypt; now the US is setting up the Jews to earn another future holocaust for all their present sins. For shame.

Reply to this comment

by vancouverboo November 21, 2006 1:54 PM EST

Paid for with American dollars.

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[agnim]

Exactly!

The US is in an unholy alliance with the evil israeli ethnic cleansing and the state terrorism used to enforce it.

Instead of funding the Middle East madness, the US could have taken the high road and help those miserable Semites all find common ground.

First it was their jehovah who helped them with the first ethnic cleansing coming out of Egypt; now the US is setting up the Jews to earn another future holocaust for all their present sins. For shame.

[vancouverboo]

Paid for with American dollars.