Israel to expand illegal settlements in Palestinian West Bank
Israel has already built well over 100 settlements across the territory that are home to some 500,000 settlers. The settlements range from small hilltop outposts to fully developed communities with blocks of flats, shopping centres, factories, and public parks.
Settlements have been widely condemned by the international community as illegal, with the UK Government announcing sanctions last week on three people and four organisations in the settler movement.
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Israel's defence minister Israel Katz said the settlement decision 'strengthens our hold on Judea and Samaria', using the biblical term for the West Bank, 'anchors our historical right in the Land of Israel, and constitutes a crushing response to Palestinian terrorism'.
He added it was also 'a strategic move that prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel'.
The West Bank is home to three million Palestinians, who live under Israeli military rule with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority administering population centres. The settlers have Israeli citizenship.
Israel has accelerated settlement construction in recent years – long before Hamas's October 7 2023 attack escalated its assault on Gaza – confining Palestinians to smaller and smaller areas of the West Bank and making the prospect of establishing a viable, independent state even more remote.
The top United Nations court ruled last year that Israel's presence in the occupied Palestinian territories is unlawful and called on it to end, and for settlement construction to stop immediately. Israel denounced the non-binding opinion by a 15-judge panel of the International Court of Justice, saying the territories are part of the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
Israel withdrew its settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005, but leading figures in the current government have called for them to be re-established and for much of the Palestinian population of the territory to be resettled elsewhere through what they describe as voluntary emigration.
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Palestinians view such plans as a blueprint for their forcible expulsion from their homeland, and experts say the plans would violate international law.
Israel now controls more than 70% of Gaza, according to Yaakov Garb, a professor of environmental studies at Ben Gurion University, who has examined Israeli-Palestinian land use patterns for decades.
The area includes buffer zones along the border with Israel as well as the southern city of Rafah, which is now mostly uninhabited, and other large areas that Israel has ordered to be evacuated.
Meanwhile, local hospitals have said that Israeli strikes killed at least 13 Palestinians overnight in Gaza.
Four were killed in a strike on a car in Gaza City late on Wednesday and another eight, including two women and three children, were killed in a strike on a home in Jabaliya. A strike on a built-up refugee camp in central Gaza killed one person and wounded 18.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which says it only targets militants and blames civilian deaths on Hamas because the militants are embedded in populated areas.
More than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, most of whom were women and children.
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