The Palestinian National Office for the Defense of Land and Resistance to Settlement Expansion has warned of the accelerating steps taken by the government of the Zionist enemy entity aimed at legalizing settlement outposts and criminal pastoral farms and transforming them into official settlements, in clear defiance of international law and international legitimacy resolutions, and under direct American political cover.
In a report issued on Saturday, the office explained that the Israeli security cabinet (“the Cabinet”) approved last Sunday the establishment of 19 new settlements in the occupied West Bank, a move described as a grave violation of international laws and norms. The decision was described by the Zionist enemy’s finance minister and minister in charge of settlement affairs within the Ministry of the “army,” war criminal Bezalel Smotrich, as a “historic decision” intended to thwart any future possibility of establishing a Palestinian state, according to Quds Press Agency.
The report indicated that this approval raised the total number of settlements sanctioned over the past three years to 69, reflecting an unprecedented acceleration in the pace of settlement expansion, according to statements by Smotrich himself.
It noted that the new settlements approved by the Cabinet are spread across various governorates of the West Bank, pointing out that they were originally settlements evacuated in 2005, or settlement outposts and terrorist pastoral farms, or neighborhoods affiliated with existing settlements that were separated and converted into independent settlements. This transformation entails the allocation of official budgets and the provision of full infrastructure and governmental privileges.
The report stressed that this step falls within an escalating trajectory led by the so-called government of the criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, aimed at entrenching the legalization of settlement outposts and converting them into officially recognized settlements, following a series of previous decisions that included separating settlement neighborhoods from major settlements and legalizing dozens of outposts. This, in turn, expands Israeli control deep inside the West Bank.
It pointed out that some of the settlements whose status has been regularized, such as “Ganim” and “Kadim,” date back to the 1980s, before being transformed, following the Oslo Accords, into isolated settlement enclaves within areas classified as (A) and (B).
The report explained that these settlements contribute to fragmenting Palestinian geography, particularly in the northern West Bank, in areas that had been subject to a ban on Israeli presence under the “Disengagement Law,” which in 2005 led to the dismantling and evacuation of four settlements in that region.
It added that the policy of converting settlement outposts and terrorist pastoral farms into official settlements has been accompanied by plans to expand existing settlements through the addition of hundreds of new housing units, as part of a comprehensive settlement project aimed at seizing more Palestinian land.
In the same context, the report referred to an announcement by the Zionist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Tuesday evening regarding the signing of an agreement with the Minister of War, Israel Katz, to relocate enemy army camps outside the “Beit El” settlement. This move would allow for doubling the area of the settlement built on the lands of the cities of Ramallah and Al-Bireh.
The “Beit El” settlement is considered one of the most prominent settlements in the central occupied West Bank, as it hosts the headquarters of the so-called “Civil Administration” that follows the Ministry of the Army, a military governing body that oversees the administration of West Bank affairs and constitutes a central instrument in entrenching the enemy and its settlement policies.
