The Israeli government has quietly seized thousands of acres of Palestinian-owned land in and around east Jerusalem after a secret cabinet decision to use a 55-year-old law against Arabs separated from farms and orchards by the vast "security barrier".
Most of the hundreds of Palestinian families whose land has been confiscated without compensation have not been formally notified that their property has been transferred to the Israeli state. But plans have already been drawn up to expand Jewish settlements on to some of the expropriated territory.
The move has drawn stinging criticism from the Palestinian leadership and some Israelis, who call it "legalised theft" and say it is evidence that the vast steel and concrete barrier under construction through the West Bank and Jerusalem is less for security than a move to expand Israel's borders.
"The government is walling in east Jerusalem for the first time in six centuries," said Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer fighting the seizures on behalf of several Palestinian families.
"It is turning the eminently reversible step of a barrier into an irreversible step by building immovable homes. It is a move to assert aggressive Israeli sovereignty over east Jerusalem."
Palestinian officials have warned that if the strategy is not reversed it could prove an insurmountable obstacle to a final peace agreement with Israel. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as the capital of an independent state.
The cabinet secretly decided to seize the land in July last year using a law passed in 1950 allowing the state to confiscate property abandoned by Arabs who fled to neighbouring countries during Israel's independence war.
Among those who have lost their land in the recent seizures is Johnny Atik. His front room, in the Bethlehem house he has lived in for 55 years, looks on to the three hectares (eight acres) of olive groves from which he is now officially deemed absent after Israel built the "security fence" between his home and his orchard.
"What is the law of absentees when we are here before your eyes? We are not absent. The law is that any Israeli with an American or European passport who goes to live outside Israel is not considered absent. But me, who lives here, is called absent," he said.
Boundaries
Immediately after occupying east Jerusalem in 1967, Israel redrew the city's boundaries to run deep into the West Bank. Swaths of land that had fallen within the municipality of Arab towns such as Bethlehem - including Mr Atik's - were suddenly defined as part of "greater Jerusalem" and therefore within the borders of the Jewish state. But the landowners were classified as residents of the occupied territories and therefore outside the country.
However, successive Israeli governments decided not to apply the absentee property law to Jerusalem because many Arabs who owned land within the area claimed by Israel lived only a short distance away in other parts of the West Bank.
But over the past two years, the invisible city boundary that Mr Atik walked across to reach his land each day was transformed into a border marked out in concrete and steel.
In July, Mr Sharon's government decided to reverse the absentee law policy on east Jerusalem, but the cabinet's decision has only now become public after the army told lawyers for some affected Palestinians. The army had promised Mr Atik a permit to cross through a military checkpoint to get to his olive trees, but his lawyer, Mr Seidemann, spent a year trying to get the pass out of the military.
"Eventually, I was told that the reason Johnny Atik couldn't go to his land was that it was no longer his, it belonged to the government," he said.
Another Bethlehem resident, Anton Salman, has lost about 40 acres. "It began in 1996 with a small road for the checkpoint. Then there is a bigger road, and then a fence. And then you lose your land. It's all done in the name of security but this is no way to bring peace," he said.
Across the valley from Mr Atik's land is the Jewish settlement of Har Homa. The clank of heavy machinery, the scaffolding crisscrossing the front of half-built flats, the cranes towering over the site all testify to the rapid expansion of the settlement. The latest Jerusalem municipal plan earmarks land for Har Homa's expansion as far as Mr Atik's land.
Expansion
The West Bank town of Beit Jala, near the Jewish settlement of Gilo, asked the Israeli government to route the barrier so that residents could still reach their land without passing through a checkpoint. The authorities refused and the army now says that everything on the Jerusalem side of the barrier - about 1,000 acres, which provide an income for 200 families - has been seized.
Some of the land is already being levelled in preparation for construction linked to a nearby Jewish settlement.
The village of Walaja, which straddles the greater Jerusalem border, is losing about 2,500 acres. An Israeli development firm already claims to have bought part of the land to build new homes for Jewish settlers.
The state has also appropriated a once thriving hotel, the Cliff, on the edge of east Jerusalem even though the owners live nearby. When the army started building the eight-metre-high concrete wall that bisects the area, it seized the hotel for "security needs". But under the regulations for constructing the barrier, the government would have had to pay more than £1m in compensation. Then the owners were told their hotel had been confiscated under the absentee property law without recompense.
The government declined to discuss the new application of the absentee property law.
Since the signing of the Oslo accords a decade ago, Israel has doubled the size of the Jewish settlements. Many Palestinians suspect that the West Bank barrier was just another means to grab territory.
"This is state theft," said the mayor of Bethlehem, Hanna Nasser. "They are thieves and they are bluffing everybody. It's not a security wall, it's the future frontier of the state of Israel."