and the repatriation of Lydda and Ramie refugees. According to Raja Shehadeh, Israeli effectively annexed the area of no man's land in 1967. No such formal act of annexation exists however. In peace negotiations, according to Gideon Biger, the Israeli position has been that they retain as sovereign property half of the NLM, while the other half, while belonging to Palestinians, should remain part of Israel, and the Palestinians compensated for its loss by accepting an area of similar dimensions elsewhere. A variant of Abdallah 1's land-trade offer resurfaced in 1978 as peace talks between Israel and Egypt were underway. Jordan expressed a willingness to renounce their claims on the Latrun area in exchange for the Israeli spur that once truncated the main Bethlehem-Jerusalem road. Israel has proposed annexing some 38.2 km² of the area. The Palestinian viewpoint rebuffs this as constituting a gratuitous appropriation of a substantial amount of uninhabited Palestinian land, with no settlers or settlements, and asserts the primacy of re-establishing the three villages that were removed and whose population was expelled. Legal status The strips of territory known as no man's land in the Latrun and Jerusalem regions were among the territories occupied by Israel following the 1967 war. Both the United Nations and the European Union consider Israeli localities in the Latrun no man's land to be illegal settlements. Notes Citations Sources Arab villages depopulated after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War Disputed territories in Asia Territorial disputes West Bank