Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has declared 800 hectares (1,977 acres) in the occupied West Bank as state land, in a move that will facilitate the use of the ground for settlement building.
The announcement on Friday came as United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has declared 800 hectares (1,977 acres) in the occupied West Bank as state land, in a move that will facilitate the use of the ground for settlement building.
The announcement on Friday came as United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
had been reversed by the previous administration of Donald Trump.
The change brought the US back into line with most of the world, which considers the settlements built on Palestinian territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war to be illegal. Israel itself disputes this view, citing the Jewish people’s historical and Biblical ties to the land.
Earlier this month, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said, “The establishment and continuing expansion of settlements amount to … a war crime under international law.”
‘Complicity and cover’
Palestinian authorities condemned the land seizure and expansion of settlements.
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the latest move a “crime” that is part of an “official policy racing against time to annex the West Bank and eliminate the possibility of creating a Palestinian state”.
“There are no morals, values, principles or international resolutions that can stop the extremist right,” the ministry said in a statement.
“The international failure to protect our people is complicity and cover for Israel’s ongoing evasion of punishment,” it added.
Smotrich, the influential leader of one of the hard-right pro-settler parties in Netanyahu’s coalition, himself lives in a settlement and has consistently backed settlement building.
COURTESY AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES
