Israel’s biggest land confiscation since the Oslo Accords dealt a new blow to the Palestinian state. Israel declared 800 hectares of land in the West Bank for settlement construction.
The territory covers most of the Jordan Valley, crucial for a future Palestinian state, and is the largest territory Israel has captured since the early 1990s. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the seizure.
The news did not surprise West Bank resident Hamza Zbiedat. Although he lives in Ramallah, his family lives in a small village near the border between the West Bank and Jordan called Zubaydat, just north of the vast area now declared Israeli state land.
“Israel has completely controlled the Jordan Valley for at least the last 15 years. The only thing Israel needs to do is announce it,” said Zbiedat, who works as an advocacy officer at the Ma’an Development Center, a Palestinian civil society organization.
The Jordan Valley is a rich strip of land that stretches along the West Bank, east of the central plateau. Sparsely populated, the region has many open and undeveloped areas, making it a valuable reserve for future development of the West Bank.
According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, nearly 90% of the Jordan Valley has been designated as Area C, meaning it remained under full Israeli control following the 1995 Oslo II Agreement.
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“Even though there are parties in Israel and the world who seek to undermine our rights to the region of Judea and Samaria and the country in general, we are pushing for a solution through hard work and strategically throughout the country,” Smotrich said, referring to the West Bank region by name. in the Bible.
The area covers 800 hectares located between three Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, Masu’a, Ma’ale Efrayim, and Yafit. Several weeks earlier, Israel took over an additional 300 hectares of land near the Ma’ale Adumim settlement.
Taken together, these areas represent the largest zone designated as Israeli state land since the first Oslo Accords in 1993, according to Peace Now, an Israeli organization that documents settlement activity.
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Now that Israel has declared most of the Jordan Valley as its own, Palestinians can use the land even longer. “We think this will help expand Israeli settlements,” said Yonatan Mizrachi, co-director of the Settlements Monitoring Branch at Peace Now.
Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories occupied since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, including East Jerusalem, are illegal under international law. In 2016, the UN Security Council adopted resolution 2334 and demanded that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Then it also underlined that the UN would not recognize any changes to the June 4 1967 line other than those agreed to by both parties through negotiations. But the Israeli government has repeatedly used orders such as state land declarations to take over Palestinian territory.
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In recent years, Israel’s Housing Ministry even created a subsidized homeownership program to combat the housing crisis. Including creating a lottery system that lures Israeli citizens to move to settlements in the West Bank.
The declaration of this land as state land means that the territory can no longer be considered private property of Palestinians by the state of Israel. This process facilitates the rental or purchase of a plot of land specified by the settler.
Human rights groups say it is almost impossible for Palestinians to appeal the declaration. Until 1967, the Jordan Valley was under Jordanian rule.
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After the war, Israel issued a military order ending land registration in the West Bank meaning Palestinian families often had no documents to prove they had private ownership of their land.
State land declarations in the occupied territories were stopped in 1992 under the government of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. But two years following Netanyahu was first elected prime minister in 1996, he returned to the practice.
Since then, regarding 4,000 hectares have been designated as state land by Israel, according to Peace Now. The total area under the direct control of Israeli settlements covers more than 40% of the entire West Bank, according to B’Tselem, also known as the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
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In 2023, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found that a total of 700 thousand Israeli settlers were living illegally in the occupied West Bank. Israel’s annexation of this vast territory might make it even more difficult for Palestinians in the West Bank to move from the north to the south of the region.
The parcels claimed in late February near Ma’ale Adumim created a continuous strip of state land between Ma’ale and another settlement called Kedar. It marks the separation between the southern West Bank and the Jordan Valley in the north.
Current movement restrictions such as Israeli military checkpoints have made it difficult for Palestinians to travel in the West Bank. Part of the territory captured by Israel lies near East Jerusalem, and is an area that Palestinians hope will become the center of a future independent state.
Since the Oslo Accords were signed in the early 90s, little progress has been made in achieving a Palestinian state. Experts, as well as the UN Security Council, say the expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land is a major obstacle to a two-state solution. (France24/Z-3)
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