- The Israeli minister lifts the project “bury” the idea of Palestinian state.
- The UN warns the plan will fragment the West Bank to isolated enclaves.
- 700,000 Israeli settlers live among 2.7 million Palestinians in the area.
The UN Human Rights Office said on Friday that an Israeli plan to build to build thousands of new homes between an Israeli settlement in the West Bank and near East Jerusalem was illegal under international law, and would put Palestinians nearby at risk of forced postponement as it described as a war crime.
Israeli right-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Thursday promised to push on a long-delayed settlement project and said the move would “bury” the idea of a Palestinian state.
The UN Rights Office spokesman said the plan would break the West Bank in isolated enclaves and that it was “a war crime for an occupying power to transfer its own civilian population to the area it occupies”.
About 700,000 Israeli settlers live among 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1980, a step that is not recognized by most countries, but it has not formally expanded sovereignty over the West Bank.
Most world powers say that settlement expansion erodes the viability of a two-state solution by breaking down the territory that the Palestinians seek as part of a future independent state.
The two-state plan imagines a Palestinian state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, which exists side by side with Israel, which captured all three territories in the Middle East War in 1967.
Israel quotes historical and biblical ties to the area and says the settlements provide strategic depth and security and that the West Bank is “contentious”, not “occupied”.
