CHAIM Hanfling knows a lot about this settlement's population boom.

Six of his 11 siblings have moved here from Jerusalem in recent years to take advantage of lower land prices, and at 29 he has added four children of his own.

Just over the Green Line that marks the territory occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the booming ultra-Orthodox community, home to more than 41,000 people, shows why the settlement freeze demanded by the Obama Administration is proving controversial for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and why Palestinian officials are insisting on it.

Amid their gleaming, modern apartment buildings, residents say they have little in common with the people who have hauled mobile homes to hilltops in hopes of deepening Israel's presence in the occupied West Bank. But they expect the bulldozers and cement mixers to keep supplying larger schools and more housing, a demand that the country's political leadership is finding hard to refuse.