Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories

Two striking aspects of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation stand out in the long-expected agreement on implementing the next stage of Israel's redeployment in the West Bank: Not only is Israel's "belligerent" occupation of the West Bank about to end, but what Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin calls the "hallucination" of a Greater Israel, fostered by a generation of Labor and Likud politicians, is also being repudiated.

The settlements and the Israeli concept of what belongs to the Arabs continue to top the Palestinians' list of priorities...

In the Israeli settlements of the West Bank, 5,000 dwelling units are currently under construction. The figures represent 6 percent of the 82,000 units under construction in Israel and in the occupied territories in March 1995, the latest date for which numbers are available...

During the first quarter of 1995, construction starts in Israel and the occupied territories were recorded at a pace not seen since the building boom of 1991. The increase has occurred exclusively in the realm of publicly financed construction.

[The following is the text of the agreement reached during the August talks between the Palestinian and Israeli delegations.] "The Palestinian delegation, headed by al-Ra'ees Yaser Arafat, and the Israeli delegation, headed by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, met in Taba, Egypt, between August 7-11, 1995, and agreed on some of the principles, to be elaborated in the Interim Agreement, as follows:

Israel's military redeployment is hard to discuss seriously while negotiations on the settlers' future remain censored...