The Israeli Ha"aretz newspaper revealed that Israeli land administration published last Sunday a bid announcement for the lease of land plots for the building of 440 new settlement units in the East Talpiyot neighborhood (high commissioner palace) on the Palestinian lands occupied in 1967.The announcement of this bid came after Israeli premier Ehud Olmert sent a letter to his settlement and housing minister Ze"ev Boim in charge of the Israeli land administration telling him that the construction in the eastern part of occupied Jerusalem should not be automatically endorsed.
The final approval to the plan of building the new settlement units in the area was done in April 2005, but the bid announcement was published only this week, according to the newspaper on Wednesday.The land on which the settlement units will be built was confiscated in 1973 from Palestinian residents of the nearby villages of Sur Baher and Jabal Mukaber, which are within the occupied Jerusalem municipality limits. The outermost plots in this area are only a few dozen meters from these villages, which vice premier Haim Ramon claimed would be transferred to the PA in the final-status negotiations.
The Israel land administration had published more than a week ago a bid for the construction of hotels in the Gilo settlement in occupied Jerusalem with an option to rezone it as residential.According to the newspaper, Olmert allegedly sent an official letter on Sunday evening to his war minister Ehud Barak, settlement and housing minister Ze"ev Boim and agriculture minister Shalom Simhon in which he told them not to carry out any construction in the West Bank without prior authorization from him and the war minister.Regarding the bid for building 440 settlement units in Talpiyot, Olmert"s office confirmed that the letter to Boim did not involve prohibition on construction in occupied Jerusalem.
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