Yet more settlements planned in East Jerusalem

By ISABEL KERSHNER, NYT
Published: March 16, 2010

Israeli groups who oppose Israeli settlement activity and monitor new developments say there are thousands more Jewish housing units in the pipeline for East Jerusalem, at various stages of the bureaucratic planning process.

“This is totally out of control,” said Hagit Ofran of Peace Now, a leftist organization that tracks settlement building. “The Netanyahu government is trying to make Jerusalem indivisible so that it will not be possible to reach a solution based on two states for two peoples.”
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The activist group, Peace Now, pointed to a notice on the Web site of the Israel Lands Authority inviting developers to bid on construction of new homes in the Jewish suburb of Neve Yaakov, in northeast Jerusalem.

The housing announcement, published on behalf of the Lands Authority and the Ministry of Housing and Construction, was posted as an “update” and was dated March 11, but it came to light only on Tuesday.

Israeli officials said that the building tender in question was actually a few months old, and that the successful bidders would be announced in April or May. Peace Now said there was no record that the building tender had been published before.
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Ariel Rosenberg, a spokesman for the Israeli Housing and Construction Ministry, said the invitation for bids to build in Neve Yaakov dated back to 2009 and was “not something new.” He had no immediate explanation of why there was a new announcement on the Web site dated March 11.