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RAMALLAH, West Bank: Israel declared some 1,700 dunams of Palestinian land in the northern part of Efrat settlement as state land last week, paving the way for the West Bank settlement to start the process of seeking government approval to build there, a report said yesterday.

The daily Haaretz said that the Israeli Civil Administration issued the declaration this week after rejecting eight appeals by Palestinians from Bethlehem area against the move. A ninth appeal was accepted, and the land covered by this appeal was consequently removed from Efrat’s jurisdiction.

However, construction is still a long way off. First, the Civil Administration must formally allocate the land to the Israeli Housing Ministry, which, under new rules adopted by Ehud Olmert’s government, cannot be done without approval from both the prime minister and defense minister.

Then the Housing Ministry must give Efrat’s local council a permit to start the usually long planning process, which involves securing permits from various agencies. Only then can the work of building some 2,500 housing units in the Givat Ha’eytam neighborhood begin.

Since the outcome of the Israeli general elections makes it likely that the next government will lean more to the right than the current one with the expected naming of Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu to form a coalition with the support of right-wing parties, Efrat plans to wait until the new government takes office before submitting its request.

Efrat, with around 9,000 residents, is the largest settlement in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, and Givat Ha’eytam is the last unbuilt hill of the seven within the town’s jurisdiction. Despite being the hill nearest Jerusalem, Ha’eytam lies outside the planned route of the separation wall, which has yet to be built in this area.

Gush Etzion is one of the settlement blocs that all Israeli governments have said they want to retain under any final-status agreement with the Palestinians.

The development came as Israeli sources said that the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US envoy George Mitchell will focus during their next visit to Israel on efforts to preserve the West Bank under the control of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

The sources said that the Americans would demand that the new Israeli government avoid creating new facts on the ground that may burden achieving an agreement in the future. Toward this end, the US administration is preparing to put heavy pressure on the new government to freeze all settlement construction and keep its promises to lift roadblocks. A freeze on settlement activity will be a higher priority than removing illegal outposts.