Israel recognises Jewish settlement built on private Palestinian land

JERUSALEM - An Israeli court has for the first time recognised as legal a Jewish settlement established on privately owned Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, court officials said Tuesday.

The settlement of Mitzpe Carmit, close to Ramallah, was established in the late 1990s on land owned by Palestinians who had title deeds recognised by the Israeli authorities.

The owners had appealed to the Israeli courts to have the settlers evicted from their land.

The Jerusalem district court declared the settlers the legal owners, finding that Israeli authorities were unaware the land was privately owned when they originally mapped out the area, in territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

It based its ruling on an Israeli law that states that even transactions with legal faults could be valid if they were conducted in "good faith".

Today, the settlement close to Ramallah is home to several dozen families.

Asked about the decision, Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said all of the settlements that Israel has built on occupied land are illegal.

"Peace can't be achieved as settlement continues," he said.

The ruling may still be appealed, but if that fails, it could serve as a precedent for the legal recognition of settlements established without permission from the Israeli authorities on occupied land privately owned by Palestinians.

The international community does not distinguish between different types of Israeli settlements in the territories it occupies, seeing them all as illegal under international law.

Settlers on public radio welcomed the ruling, which was slammed by campaign groups and left-wing politicians.

"The (district court's) ruling ... is an important achievement for settlement in Judea and Samaria," Israel's ultra-nationalist Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked wrote on Twitter, using the names of places mentioned in the Bible that Zionists believe are in today's West Bank.

The ruling shows "the property rights of Palestinians aren't equal to those of Jews and that the government is no longer obliged to respect private property," said MP Michal Rozin, a member of the left-wing opposition party Meretz.

Israel's Peace Now organisation, which monitors and opposes Jewish settlement on occupied land, said the outpost's fate would ultimately be up to the Supreme Court, where a petition by the Palestinian property owners is still pending.

The Supreme Court has consistently upheld Palestinian property rights in such cases, leading to the forced evacuation of some outposts.

Peace Now said the "granting of property rights to criminals who settled in an illegal outpost ... without permits, on private Palestinian land is outrageous".

It noted that Israel's right-wing government, which originally had opposed the settlers' land claim, later supported their position in what the organisation called an attempt to implement a controversial law on unauthorised settlement.

The legislation, passed by parliament in 2017, enables the retroactive legalisation of 4,000 settler homes built on privately-owned Palestinian land but is currently under review by the Supreme Court.

Most of the international community sees Israel's West Bank settlements as illegal and as one of the main obstacles to peace, something Israel disputes.

The settlement project, pursued by every Israeli government since the country occupied the West Bank in 1967, has fragmented the land where Palestinians hope to create their future state.

Some 500,000 Israelis live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas that are also home to more than 2.6 million Palestinians.