Israeli minister calls West Bank control measures ‘de facto sovereignty’

An Israeli checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank near the West Bank village of Nilin Picture: Nasser Nasser/AP

A top Israeli official said on Tuesday that measures adopted by the government that deepen Israeli control in the occupied West Bank amounted to implementing “de facto sovereignty”.

The steps “actually establish a fact on the ground that there will not be a Palestinian state”, Energy Minister Eli Cohen told Israel’s Army Radio, using language that mirrors critics’ warnings about the intent behind the moves.

Palestinians, Arab countries and human rights groups have called the moves announced on Sunday an annexation of the territory, home to roughly 3.4 million Palestinians who seek it for a future state.

Mr Cohen’s comments followed similar remarks by other members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Defence Minister Israel Katz.

A road in the Jordan Valley, West Bank (Ohad Zwigenberg/AP)

The moves – and Israeli officials’ own descriptions of them – put the country at odds with both regional allies and previous statements from US President Donald Trump. Mr Netanyahu has travelled to Washington to meet him later this week.

Last year, Mr Trump said he would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank. The US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that aimed to stop the war in Gaza also acknowledged Palestinian aspirations for statehood.

The measures further erode the Palestinian Authority’s limited powers, and it is unclear to what extent it can oppose them. Still, Hussein Al Sheikh, the Palestinian Authority’s deputy president, said on Tuesday, “the Palestinian leadership called on all civil and security institutions in the State of Palestine” to reject them.

In a post on X on Tuesday, he said the Israeli steps “contradict international law and the agreements signed with the Palestine Liberation Organisation”.

A group of eight Arab and Muslim-majority countries expressed their “absolute rejection” of the measures, calling them in a joint statement on Monday illegal and warning they would “fuel violence and conflict in the region”.

Israel’s pledge not to annex the West Bank is embedded in its diplomatic agreements with some of those countries and renewed warnings that it was a “red line” for the Emirates led Israel to shelve some high-level discussions on the matter last year.

They are driving us further and further away from a two-state solution and from the ability of the Palestinian authority and the Palestinian people to control their own destiny

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was “gravely concerned” by the measures.

“They are driving us further and further away from a two-state solution and from the ability of the Palestinian authority and the Palestinian people to control their own destiny,” his spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, said on Monday.

The measures, approved by Mr Netanyahu’s Security Cabinet on Sunday, expand Israel’s enforcement authority over land use and planning in areas run by the Palestinian Authority, making it easier for Jewish settlers to force Palestinians to give up land.

Mr Smotrich and Mr Katz, on Sunday, said they would lift long-standing restrictions on land sales to Israeli Jews in the West Bank, shift some control over sensitive holy sites – including Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, also known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs – and declassify land registry records to ease property acquisitions.

They also revive a government committee empowered to make what officials described as “proactive” land purchases in the territory, a step intended to reserve land for future settlement expansion.

Taken together, the moves add an official stamp to Israel’s accelerating expansion and would override parts of decades-old agreements that split the West Bank between areas under Israeli control and areas where the Palestinian Authority exercises limited autonomy.

Israel has increasingly legalised settler outposts built on land Palestinians say documents show they have long owned, evicted Palestinian communities from areas declared “military zones” and villages near archaeological sites it has reclassified as “national parks”.

More than 700,000 Israelis live in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories captured by Israel in 1967 and sought by the Palestinians for an independent state along with the Gaza Strip.

Palestinians are not permitted to sell land privately to Israelis. Settlers can buy homes on land controlled by Israel’s government.

The international community overwhelmingly considers Israeli settlement construction to be illegal and an obstacle to peace.

“These decisions constitute a direct violation of the international agreements to which Israel is committed and are steps toward the annexation of Areas A and B,” anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now said on Sunday, referring to parts of the West Bank where the Palestinian Authority exercised some autonomy.