The West Bank’s economic crisis and the expansion of Israel’s settlements are connected. Here’s how.
Hamas slams Israel for “spreading chaos” after an Israeli airstrike killed two local police officers in charge of securing and delivering food to north Gaza. In the West Bank, Israeli forces and settlers kill two Palestinians.
Israel bombs near Egypt’s fortified wall with Rafah as talks resume to reach a captive exchange with Hamas. UN experts call for arms embargo against Israel and say states supplying weapons, ammunition or intelligence risk violating international law.
At a town hall in Natick, Massachusetts this week Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told a group of supporters that she supported conditioning aid to Israel, but couldn’t remember whether she voted in favor of the United States’s $38 billion military aid deal with the country.
In fact, she cosponsored a 2018 bill that aimed to enshrine the agreement.
The new settlements would effectively cut East Jerusalem off from the southern West Bank. “Politically, this is a strategic plan that will strike a blow at the possibility of a Palestinian urban continuum in East Jerusalem,” settlement watchdog Peace Now said in a report.
The residents of Sheikh Jarrah announced on Tuesday that they were rejecting a proposal by the Israeli Supreme Court that would have made them “protected tenants” in their own homes, paving the way for the future displacement of their families by Israeli settlers.
On Sunday Israel approved plans for 1,300 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank, in the first move of its kind since US President Joe Biden took office. Later this week, the Israel Higher Planning Committee is expected to meet to push forward plans for an additional 2,862 units.
On Wednesday, Israel issued tenders for more than 2,500 new settlement housing units in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem a mere hours before US President Joe Biden was sworn into office. The Israeli government has now approved and promoted thousands of new settlement housing units in the first few weeks of 2021, while also continuing to deny Palestinians the right to build on their land in Area C — the more than 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli control.
Just days before US President-elect Joe Biden is set to take office, the Israeli government approved the construction of 800 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank — a move critics have deemed as an effort to take advantage of the final days of the pro-settlement Trump administration.
Dozens of Israeli ministers and lawmakers from Netanyahu’s and other right-wing parties signed a pledge to settle 2 million Jews in the occupied West Bank; and Israel has approved some 4,000 new settlement units. Many of these units are in Beit Hanina and Shuafat, Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.