A planning committee will meet in the coming days to approve new housing developments, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said.
Israel retroactively sanctions nine Jewish outposts in the occupied West Bank under the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A planning committee will also meet in the coming days to approve new housing developments, Netanyahu’s office announced on Sunday. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also stated that it would be 10,000 apartments.
In a first reaction, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said that Sunday’s announcement should be “condemned and rejected”. “It challenges the efforts of the US and Arab states and is a provocation to the Palestinian people and will lead to further tensions and escalations,” Abbas’ spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh said.
Initially, no statement could be obtained from the USA, but the government in Washington rejects any action – regardless of which side – that stands in the way of a two-state solution. US Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides reiterated this last month: “We want to keep the vision of a two-state solution alive. He (Netanyahu) is aware that we know that massive settlement growth does not achieve this goal will achieve.”
The US and many world powers consider the settlements illegal because they claim land on which the Palestinians aspire to establish their own state. Israel denies this. Israel has established 132 settlements since seizing the West Bank in the 1967 war, according to monitoring group Peace Now. Most recently, Israeli-Palestinian talks took place under US auspices in 2014.