TEHRAN (Tasnim) - Ahmed Amarneh's home, with a wooden door opening onto cushion-lined rooms, is not the first Palestinian residence in the occupied West Bank to receive a demolition notice from Israel.

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But it may be the first built inside a cave which the regime has threatened to destroy.

Amarneh, a 30-year-old civil engineer, lives with his family in the northern West Bank village of Farasin, where Israel insists it must approve any new residential construction and can tear down homes built without permits.

"I tried twice to build (a house), but the occupation authorities told me it was forbidden to build in the area," Amarneh told AFP.

The Oslo peace accords of the 1990s gave the Palestinians self-rule in parts of the West Bank.

However, some 60 percent of the territory dubbed Area C, where Farasin is located, remains under full Israeli civil and military control.

The United Nations considers Area C as occupied Palestinian Territory.

But Israel has increasingly allocated land there for construction of Jewish settlements - communities considered illegal under international law.

Roughly 450,000 illegal Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, alongside some 2.7 million Palestinians.

Farasin residents, aside from fearing the possibly imminent arrival of bulldozers, said they have spotted a caravan belonging to a Jewish settler in the area, who appeared to be setting up a home.

"The settler arrived here some time ago with his sheep," said Nasser, the local council head, asking why a settler would arrive at the moment they have been asked to leave.

"Our people lived here for generations. Our ancestors are buried here."