Nearly 40 per cent of the land occupied by Israel’s West Bank Jewish settlements is owned by Palestinians, an Israeli human rights group said yesterday.

Peace Now said it had obtained information from Israel’s military, which undermined claims by successive governments that the Jewish state’s hilltop settlements were built on state-owned land and not areas seized from Palestinian farmers and landowners.

It said that the leaked digital documents showed that more than 130 of the West Bank’s 162 settlements were built “either entirely or partially” on private Palestinian land, amounting to 15,000 acres.

“We are talking about a systematic and institutionalised land grab. This has been happening for decades and in almost every settlement in the West Bank,” said Dror Etkes, of Peace Now. “The data presented here has been hidden by the state for many years, for fear that the revelation of these facts could damage its international relations.”

Israeli officials cast doubt on the findings last night, saying that Peace Now’s claims predated a 1979 change in the law, before which the army could legally seize land for military purposes, before turning it over to settlement use.

But Peace Now has produced a 174-page report saying that the practice continued after 1979, with 31.27 per cent of the land used for subsequent settlements privately owned by Palestinians, and 62.36 percent by the state.

“Those parts of settlements built on private land after 1979 are illegal,” said Hagit Ofran, a Peace Now campaigner. Overall, 38.76 per cent of all Jewish settlement land was on privately owned Palestinian property.

She said that the group had already passed the information to Israel’s Attorney-General and may use it to mount legal challenges in the Supreme Court. The West Bank has been under Israeli military occupation for nearly 40 years since the Jewish state captured it from Jordan in 1967, but is claimed by the Palestinians as the basis of their future state.

Israel’s Jewish settlements are deemed illegal under international law, but Israel disputes this, pointing out that the area was under Jordanian occupation before 1967.

The most dramatic of Peace Now’s claims centre on large settlement blocs that the Government seeks to annex by enclosing them inside its controversial 450-mile West Bank barrier.

The human rights group said that 86.4 per cent of Maale Adumim, which houses about 30,000 settlers east of Jerusalem, was built on private Palestinian land, and 35.1 per cent of Ariel, which lies 22 kilometres inside the West Bank.

Shlomo Dror, spokesman for Israel’s co-ordinator of government activities in the territories, said that much of the land was acquired legally, before the 1979 ruling.

“That was something we stopped doing many years ago,” he said. The situation was confused even further because Palestinians often made claims without proper documents or secretly sold land to Israelis but told their neighbours it was seized by force, Mr Dror said.

“In many cases you can’t say if it is Palestinian private land or not,” he said. “We have had a committee working for two or three years to check on the ownership, but there are many legal questions.

“Some of the settlements are built on land we know for sure is state land, others are built in areas where the ownership is not clear.”

The Yesha Council, representing settlers, also rejected the report.

“The state of Israel founds settlements only on state land and that is the manner in which all the settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were created,” it said.

Khalil Tafakgi, a Palestinian mapping expert, questioned the accuracy of some of the report’s findings, but pointed out that all settlements were deemed illegal by the United Nations.

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