On Sunday, Israeli authorities gave the occupation army the green light to seize 60 dunams (60,000 square meters) of land in Nablus, Ma’an news agency reported a Palestinian Authority official as saying.

Ghassan Daghlas, who monitors the Tel Aviv regime’s settlement activities in the northern parts of the West Bank, said the orders will annex land from the villages of Awarta and Rujeib, located opposite the settlement of Itamar.

Israeli settlements are illegal under international law but the regime continues its construction works in the occupied territories.     

A recent report by the Israeli daily Haaretz says Israel has confiscated 1,977 acres of the Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank for its settlement activity during 2012.

The settlements, which cover an area roughly equal to 1,035 football (soccer) fields and twice as big as New York's Central Park, were approved by “military order,” the paper said.

It added that most of the new settlements were located deep in the Palestinian-inhabited West Bank.

Israeli settlers establish the outposts after wandering into the Palestinian territory, squatting on the land, building houses, then claiming ownership of the area.

Israel agreed to freeze settlement construction under the Roadmap for Peace plan in 2002. But it has failed to comply with that commitment despite repeated and widespread international condemnation.

More than half a million Israeli settlers live in over 120 illegal settlements built since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds (Jerusalem) in 1967.