The Israeli leftist group, Yesh Din, announced on Friday that it was initiating a campaign to aid the Palestinians in suing Israel for annexing their private lands and using them to construct illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, the International Herald Tribune reported.

The statement of the group came after Israel’s leading newspaper, Haaretz, published a report on Israel’s official support to settlements and outposts including those that the Israeli law considers illegal.
The settlements in question were built on privately owned Palestinian lands, built without permit or built outside of the approved plans. Some of the settlements, whole neighborhoods, were totally built on privately owned Palestinian lands, an issue which constitutes a violation to the international law and to the Israeli law.
The Herald Tribune added that this report was published as George Mitchell, the Middle East special envoy of U.S. President, Barrack Obama, conducted his first trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories.
After the outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada in 2000, Mitchell was appointed as the Chairman of an International Fact-finding Committee and called on Israel to freeze all settlement construction and expansion in return for achieving calm.
Yesh Din said that the cases against Israel will be costly for the state and could mount to hundreds of millions of Shekels.
Yesh Din’s legal counselor, Michael Sfard, said that the Palestinian have legal bases and can go to court to demand the removal of buildings on their lands, and to demand reparations for the years that they could not use their lands due to this issue.
Sfrad added that if Israel ignores compensation claims, the issue would eventually be moved to international courts.
Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land captured by Israel in the 1967 war constitute a direct violation to the international law.
Israel always ignored international and even some U.S. government calls to end the expansion and construction of settlements in the Palestinian territories as this issue is one of the biggest obstacles that the pace process faces in the region.
In 2004, and after international pressure to freeze its settlement activities, the then Israeli Defense Minister, Shaul Mofaz, asked Baruch Spiegel, a retired Israeli general, to gather a detailed database on Israel’s settlements in the Palestinian territories.
The report showed enormous violations as more settlements were built and expanded on private Palestinian lands.
The Database remained classified and several Israeli groups, such as Peace Now, filed petitions demanding Israel’s Defense Ministry to publish it but Israel said that such information is considered sensitive and could harm Israel’s security and foreign relations.
The case requiring Israel to publish all related information is still pending since two years at the Tel Aviv District Court, the Herald Tribune reported. Some of the information mentioned in the Database has been obtained by some non-governmental groups in Israel. The obtained info, although minimal, form a base for a lawsuit against Israel.
(Source: imemc.org)