OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Successive Israeli governments have invested billions of dollars over the past 50 years on settler units in the occupied West Bank, making any withdrawal from the Palestinian territory a costly proposition.

There is no official overall figure for Israel’s spending on Jewish settler units since the June 1967 War.

Each year, the finance ministry has published partial figures, amounting to $3.5 billion over the 12 years up to 2015, but the sum does not include investments before 2003.

It also does not cover the vast amounts spent on infrastructure such as special roads reserved for settlers and on their security.

More than 600,000 settlers live among 2.9 million Palestinians in the West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem, with frequent outbreaks of violence.

The figures also do not include the Gaza Strip which Israel also occupied in 1967 but from where its army and settlers pulled out in 2005.

The settlement units, which are deemed illegal under international law, are widely seen as a key obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. No Israeli government, however, has turned its back on the settlers.

Roby Nathanson, head of the Macro Centre for Political Economics, which publishes reports on settlement units, estimates the total costs since June 1967 as $20 billion.

The total surface area of settler units construction in the West Bank has doubled in 18 years, according to the non-governmental organisation.

As a financial incentive for the expansion of settler units, the average settler receives three times more in public subsidies than a resident of Israel proper within its pre-1967 borders.

Shlomo Swirski of the Adva Centre, another NGO, estimates that Israel spent $15.2 billion between 1988 and 2015 alone.

“This burden has contributed to deepening social inequality in as much as the money goes to settlements and their defence at the expense of social budgets,” he said.

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