Tel Aviv - The number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank could double if the next Israeli government implements all existing blueprints for the construction of new apartments in the occupied territory, the Israeli Peace Now movement warned Tuesday.

The Israeli Housing Ministry has over the past years drawn up blueprints for the construction of more than 73,000 new apartments in the West Bank, which are in various stages of planning.

If all those plans are realized - and if all apartments are occupied by an average of four people - the number of Jewish settlers will double with the addition of some 290,000 people, Peace Now charged. That is, if all the new tenants are either Israelis who currently live outside the West Bank, or will be the yet-to-be born offspring of current settlers.

The number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank currently stands at 285,800, in addition to another 193,700 who live in Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem.

Yariv Oppenheimer, Secretary General of Peace Now, said that of the planned new apartments most were still on the drawing board and had yet to be approved.

He expressed fear however that if the next Israeli government to be formed by hardline Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu would be one that would seek to promote settlement construction, it could resort to those blueprints.

Implementing all of them would take many years he said. "It is hard to believe that the government will implement all of these plans, but it is the potential that exists there," he warned.

"The moment there is a defence minister and a housing minister who want to promote construction in the territories they can simply realize these plans," he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

After outgoing Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni of the centrist Kadima faction refused his overtures to join a new coalition, Netanyahu, of the hardline Likud party, is more and more likely to form a narrow, right-wing government with the ultra-nationalist Israel Beiteinu of Moldovan-born immigrant Avigdor Lieberman and several ultra-Orthodox and religious factions.

Two of them, Shas and United Torah Judaism some of whose voters live in religious settlements, want to appoint one of their members to the housing ministry. Lieberman, for his part, has said his eyes are set on either the defence, or the foreign or justice portfolios.

Under the outgoing government of centrist premier Ehud Olmert, any new construction plans in the occupied territories needed the signature of both the prime minister and the defence minister.

As part of the revived peace negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the Olmert government also promised not to expropriate more Palestinian land for settlement construction and cancelled financial incentives for Israelis to live in settlements.

But it openly refused to stop building in those Jewish settlement blocks in and around Jerusalem - and near the "green line" separating Israel and the West Bank - which it vowed to keep as part of a negotiated peace agreement. It says it offered Abbas a land swap on a one-on-one basis to compensate for annexing those blocks under any such future deal.

Many of the construction plans drawn up by the Housing Ministry, but not all, are in those settlement blocks, Peace Now said in its report. (dpa)