An Israeli non-governmental organization has revealed that Israel’s successive governments have spent 20 billion dollars on the construction and expansion of settlements in the West Bank since 1967.
This came in a report released recently by the Macro Center for Political Economics on the 50th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
According to Macro’s report there is no official overall figure for Israel’s spending on Jewish settlements since the June 1967 Six-Day War but partial figures reported every year by the Israeli finance ministry state that about 3.5 billion dollars were spent between 2003 and 2015 on settlement construction activities in the West Bank alone.
Roby Nathanson head of the Macro Centre estimates the total costs since June 1967 at 20 billion dollars.
The reported costs of settlement construction do not cover the vast amounts spent on infrastructure such as special roads reserved for settlers and on their security the report noted
The figures also do not include east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip which Israel captured in 1967 but pulled out from in 2005 after dismantling its settlements.
