JERUSALEM (AFP) - Nearly 40 percent of land held in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians, according to a report published by an Israeli watchdog.
Basing its findings on maps and leaked official documents, the anti-settlement Peace Now movement said Tuesday that the land in question totalled 61 square kilometres (24 square miles).
'Israel is acting as a mafia state by indulging in the theft of private land in defiance not only of international law, but Israeli law and rulings from the high court in particular,' said Dror Etkes, who compiled the report.
'Israeli officials have for a long time pretended the settlements were built on state land, now they are proved wrong,' Yaariv Oppenheimer, a Peace Now spokesman, told a news conference in Jerusalem.
One of the examples given was the case of Maale Adumim, the largest settlement in the West Bank that lies east of Jerusalem and which the report said sits on about 86 percent of privately held Palestinian land.
In all, the main settlement blocs that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert intended to annex to Israel as part of a giant, and now stalled project to redraw the country's borders, lie on 41.4 percent of privately owned Palestinian land.
The statistics do not include 12 Israeli neighbourhoods built in occupied and annexed east Jersualem, captured in the 1967 Middle East war and part of what Israel considers its undivided capital, a move not recognised abroad.
'We are going to submit all these statistics, based on official Israeli documents, to the government's legal advisor... in the hope that he will open an inquiry and start legal proceedings against those who are guilty of land theft,' Oppenheimer said.
Speaking to AFP, a spokeswoman for the main Jewish settler lobby, rejected the report as a 'tissue of lies'.
'This report, which is nothing new, is just a tissue of lies that makes up the war waged by Peace Now against Jews,' she said.
'The settlements were built with government authorisation on land that does not belong to the Palestinians,' she said.
All settlements in the West Bank, occupied by Israel since the 1967 Middle East war, are considered illegal under international law.