Israel’s Cabinet approved plans to establish more than a dozen new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Sunday. The move comes as President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan, which has seen hostage and prisoner releases, has stalled moving forward.
Why It Matters
Trump’s 20-point plan includes language open to the possibility of a Palestinian statehood under certain circumstances. The announcement comes as Israel and Hamas have not moved past the first phase of the plan.
Palestinians, human rights groups, and the United Nations (U.N.) oppose Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, which now number more than 200, according to Peace Now, an anti-settlement watchdog group. Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal under international law and a major obstacle to peace and a two-state solution.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long rejected the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, insisting instead on maintaining open-ended control over the West Bank, annexed east Jerusalem, and Gaza.
What To Know
Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a former settlement leader and an advocate of expanding Israeli control in the West Bank, welcomed the decision on Sunday, saying it brings the number of new settlements approved in recent years to 69.
The Cabinet approval also included a retroactive legalization of several previously established settlements, the Associated Press reported, including Kadim and Ganim.
“On the ground, we are blocking the establishment of a Palestinian terror state,” Smotrich said in a statement on Sunday. “We will continue to develop, build and settle the land of our ancestral heritage, with faith in the justice of our path.”
Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza in the 1967 war, territories the Palestinians claim and seek to organize for a future state.
West Bank settlements are communities of Israelis outside the internationally recognized borders of the country that range from a handful of homes to large, built-up towns with apartment blocks. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres noted earlier this month that an average of 12,815 settler housing units were added annually between 2017 and 2022.
In 2024, the U.N.’s top court, International Court of Justice (ICJ), declared Israel’s continued presence in the Palestinian territories “illegal” and urged the country to immediately cease all new settlements, evacuate settlers, and issue reparations, in an advisory opinion.
The court said that “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law,” rendering Israel’s presence “illegal.” The ICJ, in a near unanimous vote, 14 to 1, also called for the immediate cessation of new settlement constructions and to “evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
Following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, attention has centered on Israel’s offensive in Gaza, which Palestinian health officials say has killed more than 70,000 people. However, violence has also surged in the West Bank, with a notable rise in attacks by Israeli settlers and intensified Israeli military raids, per the AP. More than 700,000 Israeli settlers now live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
What People Are Saying
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in September while signing an agreement about the E1 settlement expansion plan: “We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state; this place belongs to us…We will safeguard our heritage, our land and our security… We are going to double the city’s population.”
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said earlier this month that Israel’s continued expansion of settlements into the West Bank “continues to fuel tensions, impede access by Palestinians to their land and threaten the viability of a fully independent, democratic, contiguous and sovereign Palestinian State.”
Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, wrote in an X post on Sunday: “By every metric and in every way, Israel is consolidating apartheid and killed any hope of a 2 state solution.”
Kenneth Roth, former Human Rights Watch executive director, wrote in an X post on December 13: “Israel moves to “legalize” 19 settlements in the occupied West Bank. The move doesn’t change the fact that all such settlements are illegal — war crimes — under the 4th Geneva Convention barring transfer of an occupier’s population to occupied territory.”
What Happens Next
Netanyahu welcomed Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, to Jerusalem on Sunday.
U.S. and Egyptian, Qatari, and Turkish officials met Friday in Miami to try to advance the Gaza peace plan.
Reporting from the Associated Press contributed to this article.
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