The Israeli government says it will establish 22 settlements on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank.
It is also moving to legalise some “outposts” already built without government authorisation,.
Israel’s Ministers of Defence and Finance announced the decision earlier today.
The ministers say it is “a strategic move that prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel”.
The West Bank is home to more than three million Palestinians, who live under Israeli military rule, with the Palestinian Authority governing in limited areas.
The Palestinians see the territory as an integral part of a future state, along with occupied East Jerusalem and Gaza.
Most of the international community views Israeli settlements as illegal, with the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip seen as the basis of a future Palestinian state.
Since seizing the territories during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, nearly 500,000 Jewish Israelis have settled in the West Bank alone, across about 350 settlements and smaller outposts and farms.
As part of the move, Israel will rebuild two settlements in the northern West Bank dismantled in 2005 by a previous Israeli government, which Katz and Smotrich described as “fixing an historical injustice”.
International pressure on Israel has drastically escalated this month, primarily over the Gaza war and the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the Palestinian enclave after nearly 20 months of war.
Governments including the UK, Germany and Italy, which had supported Israel following Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack that triggered the conflict, have become more vocal in demanding that Netanyahu end the war.
Some European countries have threatened economic, diplomatic, and military penalties against Israel, while others are thinking about recognizing a Palestinian state. They have also continuously opposed new West Bank settlement construction and decried Israeli settlers’ increasingly blatant attacks against Palestinians.
