PALESTINE urged the United Nations on Thursday to condemn Israel’s “racist” expansion of illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories.

The Palestinian Authority circulated a confidential draft security council resolution to Arab member states which it hopes will be put to a vote on April 22.

Spokesman Youssef al-Mahmoud denounced “the continuous Israeli settlement offensive” and daily raids and detentions by Israeli forces which “aim to displace our people.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly claimed that theft of Palestinian land is not an obstacle to peace, called the draft resolution “a step that will push negotiations further away.”

The last attempt to pass such a resolution was in 2011, when 14 of the 15 security council voted in favour, but the text was vetoed by the US despite its stated opposition to the illegal settlements.

Some 600,000 of Israel’s eight million citizens live on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank and pro-settler parties hold the balance of power in the Knesset, giving them disproportionate influence over Mr Netanyahu’s fragile coalition government.

On Thursday, Israeli settlers and occupation forces continued their campaign of flattening Palestinian homes, workplaces and farms that has made more than 650 people — half of them children — homeless in less than three months.

In the village of Nilin, near Ramallah, troops demolished a poultry slaughter house where 72 people worked and a vehicle-painting workshop that employed 15.

And in nearby Deir Ghassana, settlers escorted by troops used heavy machinery to uproot trees on Palestinian farmland.

The UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs said more demolitions had taken place in Khirbet Tana, which Israel has declared a “firing zone” for military training.

Nearly a fifth of West Bank land has been appropriated in this way, but the UN say that 80 per cent of firing zones are not in use.

On Wednesday, Israeli troops uprooted and burnt 47 olive tree saplings that had been planted in the Silwan district of occupied East Jerusalem in memory of Palestinians killed by Israel’s security forces.

The March 30 planting was part of events marking Land Day, which commemorates the army and police killings of six Palestinian citizens of Israel during protests in 1976 against government plans to seize Arab land.