Settlements and outposts in the West Bank reach 592 by end of July

The Palestinian Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission put the number of Israeli settlements and outposts across the occupied West Bank at 592 at the end of July.

Of that total, 192 are settlements and 400 are outposts. Outposts now outnumber settlements by more than two to one, and 231 of the 400 — a clear majority — are pastoral.

The commission put the number of settlers living in them at close to 780,000: around 333,600 in the settlements ringing Jerusalem, and 446,400 in the rest of the West Bank.

It also measured land rather than people. Israel controls about 42 percent of the West Bank, a territory of 5,660 square kilometres, the commission said. Inside Area C that share rises to 71 percent, and in the Jordan Valley to 91 percent.

Area C is the part of the West Bank — roughly 60 percent of it — that the Oslo II accord of 1995 left under Israeli control, alongside the Areas A and B the same accord defined.

The three percentages do not measure the same thing. The first covers the whole territory, the second the zone where Israeli control was already the arrangement, and the third a single region within it. The distance between them is what the count is for: control is not spread evenly across the West Bank but concentrated, and the Jordan Valley figure is the highest of the three.

The commission's tally is a snapshot taken at the end of July, so any site established since then falls outside it.