Israeli far-right minister backs contentious West Bank settlement plan

Jerusalem: Israel’s finance minister on Thursday backed plans to build 3,400 homes in a particularly contentious area of the occupied West Bank, calling for the territory’s annexation in response to several countries’ plans to recognise a Palestinian state.

Israel has long had ambitions to build on the sensitive parcel of land east of Jerusalem known as E1, but the plan has been frozen for decades amid international opposition.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank are considered illegal under international law, and critics and the international community have warned construction on the roughly 12 square kilometres would undermine hopes for a contiguous future Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.

“Those who want to recognise a Palestinian state today will receive a response from us on the ground... Through concrete actions: houses, neighbourhoods, roads and Jewish families building their lives,” said Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister in Israel’s coalition government.

“On this important day, I call on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to apply Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, to abandon once and for all the idea of partitioning the country, and to ensure that by September, the hypocritical European leaders will have nothing left to recognise,” Smotrich added, using the Israeli term for the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967.

Smotrich was speaking at a pro-settlement event on the advancement of plans for the E1 parcel.

The Palestinian foreign ministry condemned the plans on Thursday and called for “genuine international intervention and the imposition of sanctions on the occupation to compel it to halt the implementation”.

“Colonial construction in the E1 area is a continuation of the occupation’s plans to destroy the opportunity for the establishment of a Palestinian state,” it added.

Israeli NGO Peace Now, which monitors settlement activity in the West Bank, denounced the E1 plan as “deadly for the future of Israel and for any chance of achieving a peaceful two-state solution”.

The NGO said the final approval hearing would be held next Wednesday by a technical committee under the ministry of defence that has already rejected all objections to the plan.

After bureaucratic steps are completed, “infrastructure work in E1 could begin within a few months, and housing construction within about a year”, Peace Now said.

The West Bank is home to around three million Palestinians, as well as about 500,000 Israeli settlers.