says the fax. At the top is the coat of arms of the Civil Administration, the branch of the IDF that governs the West Bank. Dated August 12, 2007, it is a response to a human rights researcher’s freedom-of-information request. The five bland bureaucratic sentences on the page are a confession of complete official disregard for the law.At the time, Ofrah had over 2,700 residents and over 500 buildings. The fax also states that the relevant Israeli authorities have never approved a town plan for Ofrah or defined its municipal area. Those are legal preconditions for issuing building permits in an Israeli settlement. The fax does not explain why those conditions have never been met. However, an army database on settlements known as the Spiegel Report, leaked in 2009, does give the reason: most of Ofrah was built “with no legal basis” on land privately owned by Palestinians. The state never acted to stop the trespassing.Ofrah lies north of the Palestinian city of Ramallah on the mountainous spine of the West Bank.
