Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Friday that the area in the Jordan Valley had been declared “national territory.” According to Israeli activists, it is the largest seizure of Palestinian lands since 1993.
“This is another dramatic and important step for the settlements in the Jordan Valley, Judea and Samaria,” said Smotrich, according to the Jerusalem Post (online). The right-wing extremist Smotrich, who himself lives in a settlement in the West Bank, is also responsible for civil affairs in the West Bank in the right-wing religious government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He announced the seizure on the same day that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel.
In his statement, Smotrich also pointed out that the government had already declared 300 hectares of territory in the West Bank near the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim as Israeli territory a few weeks ago. “While there are those in Israel and the world who seek to undermine our right to Judea, Samaria and the country in general, we are promoting settlements through hard work and in strategic ways throughout the country,” Smotrich said.
Settlement construction despite international protests
The “declaration” as a national territory by Israel is a bureaucratic step that clears the way for further development of the country by Israel, wrote the newspaper “Jerusalem Post”. According to the Israeli human rights organization Peace Now, the year 2024 already marks a peak in terms of the size of the areas already confiscated. In total, over 1,060 hectares have already been confiscated this year, as the NGO announced on the X platform (formerly Twitter).
Israel took control and occupied the West Bank in the Six-Day War in 1967. Despite international protests, Israel has built dozens of settlements in the Palestinian territory in recent decades, which the UN has classified as violating international law. In addition to around three million Palestinians, more than 490,000 Israelis now live in the West Bank. The Palestinians see the settlement construction as a deliberate policy by Israel to undermine an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
The UN described the establishment of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as a war crime. The USA and numerous other countries, including Austria, also repeatedly sharply criticized the settlement construction. The Foreign Ministry in Vienna recently condemned the approval of additional settlement units as an “unnecessary provocation.” Settlements are illegal under international law, would represent an “obstacle to any negotiations” and undermine the viability of the two-state solution, the Foreign Office wrote on X at the beginning of the month.
This article was updated at 2:08 p.m.
