(MENAFN- The Journal Of Turkish Weekly) The Israeli authorities have announced the seizure of 15,000 dunams of Palestinian land near the West Bank city of Nablus, according to a Palestinian official.
"Israeli forces issued orders calling for the seizure of 15,000 dunams of land in the Palestinian village of Akraba in the northern West Bank city of Nablus for military purposes," Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official responsible for the Israeli settlements file, told Anadolu Agency.
One dunam of land is roughly equivalent to 0.25 acres.
The Israeli army, he added, had informally confiscated the land several years ago and converted it into agricultural land for the use of Jewish settlers.
Since peace talks with the Palestinians collapsed in mid-2014, Israeli settlement-building activity in Jerusalem and the West Bank has increased dramatically.
International law views the West Bank and East Jerusalem as "occupied territories" and considers all Jewish settlement building on the land to be illegal.
About 500,000 Jewish settlers currently live on more than one hundred Jewish-only settlements built since Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967.
The Palestinians want these areas, along with the Gaza Strip, for a future state of Palestine.
Palestinian negotiators, however, insist that Israeli settlement building on Arab land must stop before a comprehensive peace agreement can be reached.
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