That Israel's far right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotric on Thursday
announced work would start on a planned Jewish settlement in
a key spot in the occupied West Bank, and
he said the move had a clear goal. Smotric
said it definitively buries the idea of a Palestinian state
simply because there is nothing to recognize and no one
to recognize. In me. The plan would build
3400 homes in a swath of land Israel calls E1
that stretches east of Jerusalem and would link the city
with the Jewish settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. Critics say
the move would further divide the West Bank, an
area many want to remain a contiguous territory and form
the basis of a future Palestinian state. The new
development would also sever Palestinian communities within the West Bank
from predominantly Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which many
hope would one day be their state's future capital.
Strich was clear about his broader plan. He said
it was time to declare Israeli sovereignty over the entire
West Bank, which many Israelis refer to by the
biblical names of Judea and Samaria. We condemn Israelis
. For new settlements in the West Bank, Nabel
Abu Rudeinna is a spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas
in Ramallah. He called on US President Donald Trump
to halt the settlement expansion. The American administration should
put enough pressure on the Israelis to stop this provocation
. Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in
a 1967 war. Today some 700,000 Jewish Israeli settlers
live among 2.7 million Palestinians in those areas. Many
countries consider Israeli settlements a violation of international law,
a position backed by numerous UN Security Council resolutions.
Israel rejects this interpretation, saying the West Bank is
disputed rather than occupied territory. Right-wing Israeli politicians had
long pressed for new Jewish homes in E1. Prime
Minister Sharon has been frozen the ability to build the
connection between Jerusalem and Male Dome and create thereby greater
Jerusalem. In 2005, Israel's then finance minister,
now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said the government needed
to begin construction in the area. But plans were
frozen twice in the face of objections from US and
European allies. Smotrich's announcement comes after a number of
Western powers, including France, Britain, Canada,
and Australia, announced they planned to or were considering
recognizing a Palestinian state at the upcoming United Nations General
Assembly meeting in September.