(Adds comments by government official) By Jeffrey Heller JERUSALEM, Dec 26 (Reuters) - Israel will turn a former army base in the occupied West Bank into a settlement for 30 Jewish settler families evacuated from Gaza last year, a government official said on Tuesday. A settler official said fewer than 20 families had been waiting to move into Maskiot, in the Jordan Valley, under a months-old government promise to build the first permanent housing in the West Bank for Gaza evacuees. A U.S.-backed Israeli-Palestinian peace plan known as the "road map" calls for a halt to settlement construction in the West Bank, land Palestinians want for a state. Defence Minister Amir Peretz has decided to allow the construction of 30 homes in Maskiot, a former army base that currently houses a military academy for high school students, the government official said. "The decision was taken by then-Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz in the previous government and it wasn't possible to prevent this," the official said after Israel Radio reported Peretz, leader of the centre-left Labour Party, had given the final nod. A regional council official in the Jordan Valley said building work in Maskiot would begin in two weeks, Israel Radio said. The families planning to move to Maskiot lived in two of the 21 settlements Israel dismantled in the Gaza Strip in 2005 under a "disengagement plan" promoted by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Some 8,500 settlers were pulled out of the Gaza Strip, along with Israeli troops, after 38 years of occupation. Emily Amrusy, a spokeswoman for the Jewish settlers's umbrella YESHA Council, said 42 of the 1,700 families evacuated from the Gaza Strip have been living in temporary housing in two settlements in the West Bank. She said the rest had opted to reside in Israel. "The explanation is that most of the families wanted to live in southern Israel to be close to working places and relatives," Amrusy said. She said the government had promised to build "a neighbourhood" for Gaza evacuees in Maskiot and they planned to move into caravans at the site to await the construction of permanent housing. Some 260,000 settlers live in the West Bank, home to 2.5 million Palestinians. The World Court has branded Israeli settlements on land captured in the 1967 Middle East war as illegal. Israel disputes this.
