A watchdog group says Israel began building 1,800 new settlement homes in the West Bank in 2015. Peace Now, a dovish Israeli group that tracks settlement construction, says most of the building has taken place in isolated settlements in areas of the West Bank that Israel would likely evacuate in the event of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem in 1967 and built settlements there. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but nearly 600,000 Israeli settlers remain in east Jerusalem and the West Bank. The Palestinians claim these areas as parts of a future state, a position that has wide global support. They say Israeli settlement construction is a sign of bad faith. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also has authorized 20 outposts since taking office in 2009 and plans to legalize an additional six, according to a report to be released on Sunday by the nongovernmental organization Peace Now. Four outposts have been created, including one last year, Nofei Prat South, which is located off of Route 1 on the way to the Dead Sea, the NGO said. Three of the outposts were retroactively legalized as settlements in 2012. The other 17 were authorized as neighborhoods of already existing settlements. It added that last year, construction began on 265 homes in West Bank outposts. Out of those, 32 were built on private Palestinian property in the outposts. In recent months both the European Union and the United States have spoken out against the outposts. "Along with the regular retroactive legalization of unauthorized outposts and construction of infrastructure in remote settlements, actions such as this decision clearly undermine the possibility of a two-state solution," US State Department spokesman John Kirby said in January. Peace Now based its information on court documents, statements from the Higher Planning Council of the so-called Judea and Samaria as well as aerial footage it took of the West Bank. It compiled settlement statistics for 2015, and in some instances looked at overall data from the seven years that Netanyahu has been in office as prime minister since 2009. The group has long argued that such construction makes it impossible to arrive at a two-state solution. It said that tenders were issued in 2015 for 1,143 homes over the pre- 1967 lines, of which 583 were in east Jerusalem and another 560 were in West Bank settlements. The bulk of the report, however, focused on the West Bank, where it estimated that in 2015 ground was dug for 1,800 housing starts, of which 253 of the overall structures were modular and 1,547 were permanent. This included homes in both settlements and outposts. An additional 153 homes were authorized to be constructed in 2016, it added. Some 40 percent of the starts, 746 units, were outside the route of the security barrier in 2015. Since 2009, according to Peace Now, 4,621 units were constructed outside the barrier's route. — Agencies
