Israel makes last minute push for West Bank settlements
Israeli authorities yesterday advanced plans to build an additional 780 homes in West Bank settlements, an anti-settlement monitoring group said, in a last-minute surge of approvals before the friendly Trump administration leaves office later this week.
Peace Now said more than 90 per cent of the homes lay deep inside the West Bank, which the Palestinians seek as the heartland of a future independent state, and more than 200 homes were located in unauthorised outposts the government had decided to legalise.
Israel has stepped up settlement construction during President Donald Trump’s term. According to Peace Now, Israel approved or advanced construction of more than 12,000 settlement homes in 2020, the highest number in a single year since it began recording statistics in 2012.
“By promoting hundreds of settlement units, Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu is once again putting his personal political interests over those of the country,” the group said. “Not only will this settlement activity erode the possibility for a conflictending resolution with the Palestinians in the long term, but in the short term it needlessly sets Israel on a collision course with the incoming Biden administration.”
Netanyahu’s office had no comment. But last week, he said he would seek approvals for the construction projects. They include 100 homes in Tal Menashe, a settlement where an Israeli woman was killed last month in an attack for which a
Palestinian man has been charged. The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, as part of a future independent state. They say the growing settler population, approaching about 500,000 people, makes it increasingly difficult to achieve independence.
A string of US administrations, along with the rest of the international community, opposed settlement construction. But Trump, surrounded by a team of advisers with close ties to the settler movement, took a different approach.
His administration did not criticise Israeli settlement announcements, and in a landmark decision, announced in 2018 that it did not consider settlements to be illegal under international law.
As a result, Israel approved plans for more than 27,000 settler homes during Trump’s four-year term, more than 2.5 times the number approved during the Obama administration’s second term, according to Peace Now. President-elect Joe Biden is expected to return to the traditional US position of opposing settlements, setting the stage for a possible clash with Netanyahu.