ISRAEL HAS APPROVED a new illegal settlement on a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank in Palestine, the country’s finance minister has announced.
Bezalel Smotrich, an extreme right-wing member of government who also heads civil affairs at the defence ministry, said his office had “completed its work and published a plan for the new Nahal Heletz settlement in Gush Etzion”, a bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem.
The heritage site, Battir, which UNESCO describes as “a major Palestinian cultural landscape” is known for its ancient and distinctive stepped agricultural terraces, vineyards, olive groves and complex irrigation system.
All Israeli colonies, or settlements as they are commonly known, in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law, a status bolstered by a recent advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice.
“No anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist decision will stop the development of settlements,” Smotrich, who himself lives in a settlement, posted on X.
“We will continue to fight against the dangerous project of creating a Palestinian state by creating facts on the ground.”
Smotrich has throughout the war on Gaza made incendiary remarks, the most recent being when he said it would be “moral” to starve the more than two million people in Gaza to death, while lamenting that the international community would not allow it.
The Israeli NGO Peace Now, which monitors settlement developments, said the area “is facing a full-on attack from ongoing and planned Israeli settlement activities throughout the section of the core zone of the World Heritage Site”.
The Nahal Heletz settlement, which received preliminary approval along with four others in June, lies between Gush Etzion and the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem.
Peace Now said it will flank houses in the Palestinian village of Battir.
“These actions are not only fragmenting Palestinian space and depriving large communities of their natural and cultural heritage, they also pose an imminent threat to an area considered to be of the highest cultural value to humanity,” the organisation said in a statement.
The new settlement was approved a day after National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, another hardliner, drew global condemnation when he joined thousands of Jews to pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in annexed East Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites in Islam, where Jewish prayer is banned.
Israeli settler and military violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has ramped up significantly since 7 October.
3,070 people have been displaced by the demolition or confiscation of their homes, according to the United Nations, more than double the number displaced in the ten months that preceded the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel.
In the same period, the UN has documented more than 1,000 Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
At least 625 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops and settlers in the West Bank since 7 October, according to an AFP tally based on Palestinian health ministry figures. At least 18 Israelis, including soldiers, have been killed by Palestinians in the West Bank over the same period, according to official Israeli figures.
Farmers, herders and Bedouin communities are among those subjected to ethnic cleansing through violent dispossession and restrictions preventing them from accessing their lands and livelihoods. New checkpoints have sprung up all over Palestine, with the given excuse often being the ongoing war in Gaza.
Excluding East Jerusalem, roughly 490,000 Israeli settlers now live in the territory, alongside some three million Palestinians.
Far-right parties in Israel’s governing coalition have pressed for an acceleration of settlement expansion and some government ministers have handed out weapons to settlers.
According to a European Union report, last year Israel advanced plans for 12,349 homes to be built in the West Bank, the most in 30 years.
The settlements represent the biggest threat to the two-state solution envisaging Israeli and Palestinian states existing side by side, something the Israeli parliament recently voted overwhelmingly against.
Colonies in the West Bank often begin as small outposts on stolen Palestinian land, which are not at first legally recognised by Israel. Eventually, however, outposts can be made official settlements retroactively by the state.
There are currently more than 250 Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Some are the size of small cities.
Outposts and settlements are established with the support of the Israeli military.
With reporting from AFP
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say