Until a few days ago, when Israel's Channel 10 showed footage of hardline Jewish settlers freely coming and going through the thick iron gate, the fact civilian families were squatting at the Plugat Hamitkanim military base went largely unnoticed.

Prompted by the footage, however, the activist Peace Now movement has asked the Supreme Court to immediately expel the settlers, who have lived at the base since 1991 while the flashpoint town of Hebron just outside their walls has been consumed by the Middle East conflict.

"Land confiscated for military means cannot be exploited for settlement," says Yariv Oppenheimer, who heads the Israeli group which staunchly opposes Jewish settlement on occupied Palestinian territory.

Peace Now says the situation at the base strongly suggests the armed forces "annexed this plot of land in Hebron to help establish a civilian residential area and not for military purposes."

Israeli settlers can be seen walking freely into the base, but other civilians are stopped at the gate and told the area is a restricted military zone.

Soldiers at the base are officially responsible for the security of the hardline settlers who live in Hebron, which is home to 800 Jews -- many of them religious students -- and 130,000 Palestinians.

The town is also a stronghold of the Islamist Hamas movement and has been for years a flashpoint of violence between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces.

Under an agreement with the Palestinian Authority, Israel pulled out of 80 percent of Hebron in 1997, retaining an enclave for Jewish settlers around a synagogue-mosque complex in the town centre where the biblical patriarchs Abraham and Isaac are believed to have been buried.

Jewish West Bank settlements are widely seen as one of the major hurdles in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians that were revived at a US conference in November but have since made little tangible progress.

And animosity between the two sides is particularly high in Hebron, where in 1994, a Jewish extremist gunned down 29 Muslims as they prayed inside the Ibrahimi mosque at the site Jews refer to as the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

Peace Now warns the presence of civilians on the military base only makes matters worse. "According to international law the placing of civilians inside a military base turn them into legitimate targets of attacks by enemy forces."

But David Wilder, a spokesman for the settlers in Hebron, insists the settlers are the rightful owners of the land.

"This piece of land where the army base was built had been bought by Jews at the beginning of the last century," he said.

An army spokesman said a few settler families have been living on the base since 1991 and enter the facility through an adjacent religious school, even though children could be seen walking through the main gate unhindered.

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