Reuters
Wed, August 20, 2025
FILE PHOTO: Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich speaks at a press conference regarding settlements expansion, near the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim
Israeli flag flutters, as part of the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim is visible in the background, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank
JERUSALEM (Reuters) -A widely condemned Israeli settlement plan that would cut across land that the Palestinians seek for a state received final approval on Wednesday, according to a statement from Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
The approval of the E1 project, which would bisect the occupied West Bank and cut it off from East Jerusalem, was announced last week by Smotrich and received the final go-ahead from a Defence Ministry planning commission on Wednesday, he said.
"With E1, we are delivering finally on what has been promised for years," Smotrich, an ultra-nationalist in the ruling right-wing coalition, said in a statement. "The Palestinian state is being erased from the table, not with slogans but with actions."
Restarting the project could further isolate Israel, which has watched some Western allies frustrated by its continuation and planned escalation of the Gaza war announce they may recognise a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly in September.
"We condemn the decision taken today on expanding this particular settlement, which ... will drive a stake through the heart of the two-state solution," said U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric. "We call on the government of Israel to halt all settlement activity."
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry also condemned the announcement, saying the E1 settlement would isolate Palestinian communities living in the area and undermine the possibility of a two-state solution.
British Foreign Minister David Lammy said on X: "If implemented, it would divide a Palestinian state in two, mark a flagrant breach of international law and critically undermine the two-state solution."
A German government spokesperson commenting on the announcement told reporters that settlement construction violates international law and "hinders a negotiated two-state solution and an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not commented on the E1 announcement.
However on Sunday, during a visit to Ofra, another West Bank settlement established a quarter of a century ago, he made broader comments, saying: "I said 25 years ago that we will do everything to secure our grip on the Land of Israel, to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, to prevent the attempts to uproot us from here. Thank God, what I promised, we have delivered."
The two-state solution to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict envisages a Palestinian state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, existing side by side with Israel.
Western capitals and campaign groups have opposed the settlement project due to concerns that it could undermine a future peace deal with the Palestinians.
The plan for E1, located adjacent to Maale Adumim and frozen in 2012 and 2020 amid objections from the U.S. and European governments, involves the construction of about 3,400 new housing units.
Infrastructure work could begin within a few months, and house building in about a year, according to Israeli advocacy group Peace Now, which tracks settlement activity in the West Bank.
Most of the international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal under international law.
Israel disputes this, citing historical and biblical ties to the area and saying the settlements provide strategic depth and security.
(Reporting by Lili Bayer and Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem, Ali Sawafta in Ramallah, Rachel More in Berlin and Michelle Nichols at the United Nations; Editing by Aidan Lewis, Rod Nickel)
Israel starts Gaza assault, approves West Bank plan
Rafi Schwartz,
The Week US
Thu, August 21, 2025
IDF soldiers prepare tanks on Aug. 18, 2025, near the Gaza Strip's northern borders. | Credit: Elke Scholiers / Getty Images
What happened
Israel Wednesday said its forces have pushed into the outskirts of Gaza City and it will activate 60,000 reservists for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned operation to seize the whole city. Netanyahu's government also gave final approval Wednesday to a controversial settlement project in the West Bank that would effectively cut the occupied Palestinian territory in two. Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said approval of the settlements meant the "dangerous idea" of a Palestinian state was "being erased from the table."
Who said what
The Israeli Defense Forces "have begun preliminary operations and the first stages of the attack on Gaza City" and Hamas' "battered and bruised" fighters, Israeli military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin told reporters. But Israel's "exhausted military may face a manpower problem," CNN said. In a "country of fewer than 10 million people," The Associated Press said, the large call-up of reservists "carries economic and political weight."
Israel is "bucking international criticism" and "growing support" for Palestinian statehood in moving ahead with its Gaza City invasion and West Bank settlements, The New York Times said. The two moves suggest that Netanyahu is "bending to the ideologies of extremists" in his government, "even at the cost of isolating Israel internationally." In a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, 58% of Americans said they believed every country in the United Nations should recognize Palestine as a nation.
In Gaza, residents are "bracing for the worst," said Al Jazeera. Israel's assault "will just create another mass displacement of people who have been displaced repeatedly," U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told reporters. The situation in Gaza is "nothing short of apocalyptic reality for children, for their families and for this generation," Save the Children regional director Ahmad Alhendawi told the AP.
What next?
Israel said it would warn Gaza City residents before a full-scale attack and give civilians a chance to evacuate. The IDF reservists won't have to report for duty until next month, "an interval that gives mediators some time to bridge gaps between Hamas and Israel" over a ceasefire proposal Hamas endorsed earlier this week, Reuters said.
Israel approves settlement project that could divide West Bank
Melanie Lidman, Associated Press
Wed, August 20, 2025
Israel has given final approval for a controversial settlement project in the occupied West Bank that would effectively cut the territory in two, and that Palestinians and rights groups say could destroy plans for a future Palestinian state.
Settlement development in E1, an open tract of land east of Jerusalem, has been under consideration for more than two decades – but was frozen due to US pressure during previous administrations.
On Wednesday, the project received final approval from the Planning and Building Committee after the last petitions against it were rejected on August 6.
If the process moves quickly, infrastructure work could begin in the next few months and construction of homes could start in around a year.
View of an area near Maale Adumim in the Israeli-occupied West Bank (Ohad Zwigenberg/AP)
The plan includes around 3,500 apartments to expand the settlement of Maale Adumim, far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said during a press conference at the site last Thursday.
Mr Smotrich cast the approval as a riposte to western countries that announced their plans to recognise a Palestinian state in recent weeks.
“This reality finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state, because there is nothing to recognise and no-one to recognise,” Mr Smotrich told reporters.
“Anyone in the world who tries today to recognise a Palestinian state will receive an answer from us on the ground.”
The location of E1 is significant because it is one of the last geographical links between Ramallah, in the northern West Bank, and Bethlehem in the southern West Bank.
The two cities are 14 miles apart by air, but Palestinians travelling between them must take a wide detour and pass through multiple Israeli checkpoints, adding hours to the journey.
The hope for final status negotiations for a Palestinian state was to have the region eventually serve as a direct link between the cities.
Peace Now, an organisation that tracks settlement expansion in the West Bank, called the E1 project “deadly for the future of Israel and for any chance of achieving a peaceful two-state solution” which is “guaranteeing many more years of bloodshed”.
Israel’s plans to expand settlements are part of an increasingly difficult reality for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as the world’s attention focuses on the war in Gaza.
There have been marked increases in attacks by settlers on Palestinians, evictions from Palestinian towns, and checkpoints that choke freedom of movement, as well as several Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
More than 700,000 Israelis now live in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories captured by Israel in 1967 and sought by the Palestinians for a future state.
The international community overwhelmingly considers Israeli settlement construction in these areas to be illegal and an obstacle to peace.
Israel’s government is dominated by religious and ultra-nationalist politicians with close ties to the settlement movement.
Mr Smotrich, previously a firebrand settler leader and now finance minister, has been granted Cabinet-level authority over settlement policies and vowed to double the settler population in the West Bank.
Israel has annexed east Jerusalem and claims it as part of its capital, which is not internationally recognised.
It says the West Bank is disputed territory whose fate should be determined through negotiations. Israel withdrew from 21 settlements Gaza in 2005.
Israeli committee approves controversial West Bank settlement project
DPA
Wed, August 20, 2025
Israeli soldiers raid the Balata refugee camp in Nablus. Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
An Israeli planning committee approved a highly contested settlement project in the occupied West Bank on Wedneday, according to the Israeli organization Peace Now, which had a representative at the meeting.
Critics say the move could severely undermine prospects for a future Palestinian state.
The plan foresees the construction of about 3,400 housing units in the so-called E1 area, a stretch of land between East Jerusalem and the settlement of Maale Adumim.
The area, about 12 square kilometres in size, is considered one of the most sensitive in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Construction there would effectively divide the West Bank into northern and southern sections, making it much harder, if not impossible, to form a connected Palestinian state - which has always been envisaged to include the geographically distinct Gaza Strip.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the proposal last week, saying the step "buries the idea of a Palestinian state once and for all."
The move comes as several countries, including France, Canada, and Australia, have pledged to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September.
Israel has rejected such recognition, calling it a "reward for Hamas" following the October 7, 2023, attack.
Israel has repeatedly postponed construction plans for E1 in the past, due to international pressure.
A spokeswoman for Peace Now said Wednesday's authorization was the "final approval."
However, the government could stop the plan at any time in the future if it wanted to. In the past, projects had been stopped even after construction had already begun, the advocacy group noted.
West Bank turning into 'patchwork quilt'
In 1967, Israel seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where more than 700,000 settlers now live among some 3 million Palestinians. Under international law, the settlements are illegal.
The Palestinians claim the territories for their own state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Even under the status quo, however, the systematic settlement of the West Bank would leave the Palestinians with a patchwork of land to form their own state.
The Israeli government rejects the two-state solution on the grounds that it would endanger Israel's existence. Right-wing government ministers are very pro-settler and are pushing for Israel to annex the West Bank.
According to Peace Now, efforts to develop the E1 area date back to the 1990s. After Palestine was recognized as a UN observer state in 2012, there was an upswing in the project at the urging of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. However, the initiative was subsequently slowed down.
How does Israel justify the construction plans?
The Israeli leadership justifies the construction plans in E1 with security interests, arguing that creating territorial continuity between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim is important from this perspective.
Right-wing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich openly says that the aim is to prevent the establishment of a future Palestinian state, which he sees as an existential threat to Israel.
He says the construction plans are "Zionism at its best" and strengthen Israel's sovereignty. Smotrich is also a minister in the Defence Ministry with responsibility for civilian affairs in the West Bank.
He has threatened to annex the West Bank if Western countries go ahead with their plan to recognize a Palestinian state next month. Nearly 150 of the 193 member states of the United Nations have already done so.
Over 20 nations join EU, UN in opposing Israel’s illegal E1 settlement plan
Al Jazeera
Thu, August 21, 2025
(AFP)
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The United Kingdom, Australia and Japan are among 21 countries that have condemned Israel’s plans to build a controversial illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank, which they say renders a future two-state solution for Palestinians impossible.
“We condemn this decision and call for its immediate reversal in the strongest terms,” the 21 countries said in a joint statement on Thursday, describing Israel’s construction plans as a “violation of international law”.
The statement follows news this week that Israel will formally move forward with a settlement on a 12-square-kilometre (4.6-square-mile) tract of land east of Jerusalem known as “East 1” or “E1”.
The development, which will include 3,400 new homes for Israeli settlers, will cut off much of the occupied West Bank from occupied East Jerusalem while also linking up thousands of illegal Israeli settlements in the area.
East Jerusalem carries particular significance to Palestinians as the top choice for the capital of a future Palestinian state.
The group of 21 nations said any plans for a two-state solution will become impossible “by dividing any Palestinian state and restricting Palestinian access to Jerusalem”.
The group includes Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.
The illegal settlement also “risks undermining security and fuels further violence and instability, taking us further away from peace”, the group said, while bringing “no benefits to the Israeli people”.
The Palestinian Authority, the European Commission and United Nations chief Antonio Guterres have all voiced opposition to plans for the E1 settlement since Israel first announced the news last week.
“Coupled with ongoing settler violence and military operations, these unilateral decisions are fuelling an already tense situation on the ground and further eroding any possibility for peace,” the European Union said in a statement on August 14.
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said settlements such as E1 will help erase Palestine from the map, even as Palestinian statehood gains increasing international recognition from UN member states.
“This reality finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state, because there is nothing to recognise and no one to recognise,” Smotrich said last week.
Analysis: Israel E1 settlement plan makes Palestinian state further away
Mat Nashed
Thu, August 21, 2025
Israel’s approval of a long-delayed and controversial settlement plan on Wednesday intends to end any chance of a contiguous Palestinian state, say analysts, local human rights groups and Palestinian communities likely to be affected.
Known as East1 or E1, the plan would link thousands of illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem – which is already illegally annexed by Israel – to the expanding Maale Adumim settlement bloc in the occupied West Bank.
This would fully sever East Jerusalem – which Palestinians have long considered the capital of their own future state – from the rest of the occupied West Bank.
European states have long warned that the E1 plan is a red line, said Tahani Mustafa, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group (ICG).
Some of these states, such as Ireland, France, Norway and Spain, have recently announced plans to recognise a Palestinian state in the face of mounting pressure to take action against Israel for its war in Gaza.
Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, warned last year that a new settlement would be established for every country that recognises Palestine.
More recently, Smotrich, who himself lives in an illegal settlement on Palestinian land, said last week that the E1 plan would “bury” hopes for a Palestinian state.
Israeli politicians, including Smotrich, have long been open in remarking that the establishment of settlements in the occupied West Bank creates “facts on the ground” and regard the territory as an integral part of the “land of Israel”.
Mustafa said that Israel calculated long ago that the global community would take no meaningful action to stop Israel from killing the two-state solution.
“There won’t be anything left to recognise if these states keep allowing Israel to annex the West Bank and destroy Gaza,” she told Al Jazeera.
Opportune
The E1 plan was first drummed up in 1994 under then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, just a year after he inked the United States-backed Oslo Accords, which ostensibly aimed to bring about a Palestinian state before the new millennium
In 2004, Israel began building a police station and constructing new roads in that area of Palestinian land. Since then, construction and further planning have been mostly frozen to appease Western leaders, who feared that building thousands of new housing units there would make it impossible to establish a Palestinian state across the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Yet since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, the US and Europe have allowed Israel to violate every previous “red line” in the name of “self-defence”, said analysts and human rights monitors.
Over the last two years, Israel has carried out its war on Gaza – killing more than 62,000 Palestinians and destroying the territory – and has violently attacked large swaths of the West Bank, forcing out tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.
Israeli soldiers and settlers have also ramped up their violence against Palestinians, killing more than 1,000 people without repercussions.
Israel is now betting on its strong support from US President Donald Trump to accelerate the E1 plan, which would put the final “bullet” in the coffin of a Palestinian state and uproot Palestinian Bedouin communities, said Murad Jadallah, a researcher with the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq.
“Israel knows that now is the time [to go through with the E1 plan] because it has US support in Washington to do so,” Mustafa, from the ICG, told Al Jazeera.
(Al Jazeera)
Along with severing East Jerusalem, the controversial plan would physically split the north of the West Bank from the south, further confining Palestinians to ever smaller and isolated pockets of land.
On top of that, several thousand people live in 18 Palestinian shepherd communities in the area encompassing the E1 settlement plan.
The United Nations and Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups have said this plan would uproot Palestinian communities and likely constitute a “forced transfer of a population”, which is a crime against humanity under international law.
“It is very strategic for Israel to push these communities [off their land],” said Al-Haq’s Jadallah.
Fighting to stay
For decades, shepherd communities in the Jordan Valley have protected the possibility of a Palestinian state by refusing to leave their land, despite facing repeated settler attacks and demolition orders.
Most of these communities migrated to Khan al-Ahmar – an area in the central West Bank between Jerusalem and the Maale Adumim settlement – after they were driven out of the Naqeb (Negev) desert by Israel in the 1950s.
The expulsions were part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing, in which 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their lands by Zionist militias to make way for the state of Israel – an event Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or Catastrophe.
Imad al-Jahalin, the leader of a shepherd community in Bir al-Maskub, one of many villages in the E1 zone, says his community has managed to protect itself from expulsion for years.
Last year, the community hired an Israeli Jewish lawyer to file a lawsuit against settlers who occupied some of their homes. The rights group Amnesty has previously accused the Israeli court system of serving to “rubber stamp” Israel’s occupation in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Still, al-Jahalin said his village managed to win a court order to kick out the settlers from their homes. That order was implemented, but he worries they may not win another legal battle if the state begins implementing the E1 plan.
“There is fear and panic because we don’t know if this [settlement] is going to cut through our village and houses,” he told Al Jazeera.
But Jadallah is quite certain that the E1 plan will uproot Bedouin communities in and around Khan al-Ahmar, adding that they will be forced to migrate to large cities in the West Bank.
Their forced displacement to urban centres would require them to leave their livelihoods as shepherds behind.
“Palestinian history and society is losing one layer – or component – from its identity [because of Israeli attacks against Bedouins],” he told Al Jazeera.
Irreversible changes
The E1 plan should be understood as the culmination of Israeli attempts to change the spatial reality of the West Bank, so that a Palestinian state will never come to fruition, said Mustafa from the ICG.
She added that this is a strategy Israel has deployed since signing the Oslo Accords.
Israel, for instance, has long uprooted entire Palestinian villages and dispersed communities, bulldozed bustling refugee camps and erected dozens of barricades to impede the movement of Palestinians.
“The fact Israel is able … to reshape the urban landscape of the West Bank and make [those changes] so irreversible is indicative that Israel has no intention of committing to a two-state solution,” she said.
Alon Cohen, the head of the West Bank area for Bimkom, an Israeli human rights organisation advocating for an end to the occupation, added that there is no economic or housing rationale for implementing E1.
He stressed that the logic behind E1 was to simply encroach and irreversibly fragment Palestinian territory.
“Israel always uses settlement planning as a weapon,” he told Al Jazeera.
Both Mustafa and Cohen believe the implementation of E1 will make life for Palestinians in the West Bank even more unbearable, stressing that the ultimate plan is to push more Palestinians to consider leaving the West Bank.
However, al-Jahalin said that’s not an option for him and his community in Bir al-Maskub.
“Nobody here has any idea where they will end up in the future [if we are forcefully displaced],” he told Al Jazeera.
“[Our] people for now … are not thinking of going anywhere.”
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