Israeli settlers building 100 illegal homes

Israeli settlers have illegally begun work on at least 100 homes in the occupied West Bank since the end of a freeze on settlement construction, Israel's Peace Now movement said on Thursday.

"Since the end of the settlement freeze at the end of September, at least 100 buildings are now under construction in the West Bank," Peace Now's secretary general Yariv Oppenheimer told AFP.

In November 2009, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implemented a freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank, but he refused to renew the ban after it expired on September 26, despite intense international pressure.

"The illegal building being carried out without the necessary permits from the authorities is taking place both in existing settlements and outposts," Oppenheimer said.

"If an Israeli built under the same circumstances in Tel Aviv for example, it would all be destroyed on the spot and he would brought to justice."

Danny Dayan, head of the Yesha Council, a leading settler organisation, told military radio he could neither confirm nor deny Peace Now's figures.

"But we have to keep the big picture in mind, because the real scandal is the failure of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, since he took office in March 2009, to issue a single call for tenders for legal construction of houses in Judea and Samaria," he said, using the biblical name for occupied West Bank.

"The government is strangling the settlements," he said, pointing out that Netanyahu approved at least 4,600 tenders for West Bank settlements during his last term between 1996 and 1999.

And in the two-year government headed by Labour politician Ehud Barak, from 1999 to 2001, some 4,900 homes were approved for construction in occupied West Bank settlement, Dayan said.

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