OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, June 5 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - As the issue of the illegal Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian territories makes one of the biggest obstacles before a Mideast peace, 400 North Americans Jews will immigrate to Israel this month.

The 400 are to arrive in Israel Sunday, June 9, on a chartered plane funded by an organization created to finance immigration through the help of private donors, including a Christian group, the daily Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, reported Wednesday, June 5.

It will be the first time in at least 25 years that such a large number of North American immigrants have arrived at one time, the paper said.

Rabbi Joshua Fass, the founder of the organization, hopes this will be a quarterly event that will change the face of North American immigration through his new U.S. group, Nefesh b'Nefesh.

A detailed new map of the West Bank published May 13 showed that Israeli settlers exert control over nearly half of the Palestinian territories through a strategic placement of a few Jewish colonial settlements.

The study, released by the B'Tselem center for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, was based on previously unpublished documents collected from Israeli municipal officials over the past nine months.

It shows that the Jewish settlements themselves occupy 1.7 percent of the West Bank territory, where Palestinians want to create their own state.

The group Nefesh b'Nefesh offers economic assistance in the form of one-time grants of $5,000 to $25,000 to each new arrival or family, with the help of private donors, the paper said.

Funding for this initial group of 400 comes mostly from a $2 million grant from the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the group's president, said this is the first time American Christians are funding Jewish immigration to Israel. In the past, he said, the mainly evangelical Christian supporters of the organization had helped Jews from elsewhere immigrate, the Post said.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and most recently, Argentina, have immigrated to Israel.

He said the contribution was made possible, thanks to the fellowship's 250,000 predominantly Christian donors, who give millions of dollars every year to fund a variety of projects to help Israel.

He hopes the program, that has received applicants up through the year 2005, to bring at least one chartered plane every three months.

This summer, a second group of at least 150 North American immigrants will arrive, bringing the total to 550, the Israeli paper added.

The B'Tselem study shows the settlement population doubling since the 1993 Oslo accords that established the Palestinian Authority, reaching some 380,000 people.