Palestinian landowners sue Israel over 'land robber' Jewish settlers

Five Palestinian landowners are suing the state of Israel over the loss of their land to an illegal outpost in a lawsuit that could set a precedent for tackling Jewish settlement growth in the West Bank.

The case comes as settlers have boasted of rapid expansion of their communities, despite hopes raised last year in a US-backed peace summit that the Jewish state would freeze settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territory.

The lawsuit calls the 40 or so Jewish families who have built trailer homes on the hilltop of Migron, near Ramallah, “ideological robbers of the land” and makes a demand for 1.5 million shekels (£240,000) from the State for failing to remove them.

It accuses Israel of “betraying its legal and moral obligations and refraining from protecting the plaintiffs and their property and instead, is helping the thieves by its actions and lack of action”.

The Palestinians, backed by an Israeli human rights group, are petitioning the High Court to order the immediate evacuation of the land, which an earlier inquiry ruled was privately owned by Palestinians.

Orders have been given to move the settlers, but the Government has chosen to negotiate with the settlers' council for them to leave peacefully, once housing on an alternative location in the West Bank is finished.

The outpost was seized nine years ago by settlers keen to take control of the area they refer to as Judaea and Samaria, its Biblical name. The plaintiffs lodged their lawsuit on Sunday.

Michael Sfard, the Israeli lawyer representing the Palestinian land-owners, described the State's refusal to enforce the law as a case of “cops and robbers joining forces, a situation characteristic of countries that are controlled by organised crime or the Mafia”.

The case is expected to highlight how the State has helped to facilitate the development of the outpost, including the alleged payment of more than 4 million shekels by the Housing Ministry to connect the outpost to local infrastructure. Israel has pledged to remove illegal outposts - crude trailer parks that slowly become small towns as fixed structures are built - but critics have accused it of doing too little to tackle one of the key causes of Palestinian anger. Israeli media report that 15,000 settlers have moved into existing settlements this year alone.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article4894518.ece