An Israeli rights group denounced on Monday a government decision to launch extensive land registration for parts of the occupied West Bank, saying it could help advance annexation of the Palestinian territory.
“It is a tool for annexation,” said Yonatan Mizrachi of the Settlement Watch project at Israeli nongovernmental organisation Peace Now.
The West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, has no comprehensive land registry, with some areas unregistered or residents holding deeds from before the Israeli occupation.
The Israeli security cabinet on Sunday decided to initiate a land registration process in the West Bank’s Area C, which covers more than 60 percent of the territory and is under full Israeli control.
Though the process would likely take “years” according to Mizrachi, he said that Palestinians in Area C could lose land if Israeli authorities do not accept their claim to it.
This might lead to “a massive land theft”, Peace Now said, adding that the process could result “in the transfer of ownership of the vast majority of Area C to the (Israeli) state”.
“The Palestinians will have no practical way to realise their ownership rights,” the anti-settlement group said.
Some Israeli ministers have advocated the annexation of the West Bank, home to around three million Palestinians as well as some 500,000 Israelis living in settlements that are illegal under international law.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who lives in a settlement, has said that 2025 would be the year Israel extends its sovereignty over parts of the West Bank.
To Mizrachi, the government’s decision was primarily “about… the places where they want to expand settlements”, including in areas considered state land.
He mentioned remarks by Defence Minister Israel Katz, who praised the move in the official statement announcing it.
Katz said that launching land registration “is a revolutionary decision that brings justice to Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria”, the biblical name that the Israeli government uses to refer to the West Bank.
The process will lead to the “strengthening, establishment and expansion” of settlements, Katz was quoted as saying.
He also said it would block “attempts to seize land” by the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in parts of the West Bank but not Area C.
Mohammad Abu al-Rob, director of the Palestinian Authority’s communication centre, told AFP that the decision was “a dangerous escalation of Israel’s illegal policies aimed at entrenching its occupation and advancing de facto annexation.”
Area C is “an inseparable part” of the rest of the Palestinian territories, he said.
Abu al-Rob called on the international community to “reject this unlawful decision and to take immediate, concrete action to thwart its implementation”.