Gaza, it is slowly and violently restructuring the other, West Bank While Israel continues to attack one of Palestine’s two non-contiguous regions.
Nowhere is this clearer than in data on settlements and attacks on Palestinians. More than half a century later, the region now houses more than five lakh settlers. Tenders refer to proposals issued by the government for the construction of housing units. With Israel set to go to the polls later this month, the Netanyahu government has been tightening its grip on the West Bank. It has also issued open calls for occupation. “There are very specific communities who support settlement expansion and reject any settlement dismantling.
Israel’s occupation of Judea and Samaria, the biblical term for West Bank used by the Israeli government, began in 1967 following the Six-Day War. And this has only intensified since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. An Israeli activist group that tracks settlements, fewer than 5,000 Israelis lived in the West Bank in 1967, according to Peace Now. That is, around 5% of Israel’s population now live in the occupied West Bank. While more than 40,000 housing units in West Bank settlements have been put out to tender since 2002, nearly a quarter of these were put out to tender in the past two years. However, the tender process is required only in 13 settlements and is not required in others, so the actual number of housing units being constructed could be much higher. Further, nearly 430 outposts — Israeli settlements considered illegal even under Israeli law — have been established since the 1990s. More than 50% of these outposts were established in the past three years alone. Through this, Israel has taken over 9,00,000 dunams of West Bank land. Two months before the elections, Israel published tenders for construction of 1,234 Israeli homes as part of its E1 settlement project that aims to create a continuous settlement ‘corridor’ between occupied East Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim. The country’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, on September 27, called for a full-scale war in the occupied West Bank and urged the military to use the tactics employed in Gaza.
Despite being considered illegal under international law, Israel has slowly been asserting “sovereignty” over the region with increased restrictions for Palestinians and expansion of Israeli settlements. Israeli law also allows “declaration” instead of “confiscation” of privately owned Palestinian land to build settlements. And that’s most of the right-wing, but the ones who are most committed to it are the firm right…,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy, an American think tank.
