Israel moving ahead with settlement plans that would split West Bank in two, rights group says
A Palestinian man reacts as Israeli forces stand guard during the demolition of a Palestinian building near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Wednesday. (Mussa Qawasma/Reuters)Social SharingA rights groups says the Israeli government is forging ahead with a contentious settlement expansion plan that would effectively divide the occupied West Bank, a plan long criticized as a threat to the viability of a future Palestinian state.
On Wednesday, Israeli rights group Ir Amim said Israel's government will open the bidding for an additional 2,167 units in a settlement project that would effectivelyΒ cut the West Bank in two.
The tender for 2,167 units is in addition to a tender for 1,234 units announced at the end of August, tripling the amount of housing units and bringing the total number of housing units to 3,401, the group said in a statement.
Settlement development in this open tract of land east of Jerusalem known as E1 is especially contentious because it runs from the outskirts of Jerusalem deep into the occupied West Bank. It would bisect the West Bank and cut it off from East Jerusalem β fragmenting the land Palestinians hope will form the heart of a state.
An Israeli settlement is seen as smoke rises from burning olive groves which, Palestinians say, were set alight by Israeli militant settlers, in Burqa in the the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Thursday. (Ali Sawafta/Reuters)The United Nations and most countries deem the settlements illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention pertaining to military occupations. Israel rejects this, calling the area "disputed" rather than occupied.
The E1 project has been under consideration for more than two decades, but was frozen due to U.S. pressure during previous administrations.
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A spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud βAbbas condemned the new units as a violation of international law.
Israel has not officially confirmed the bids are out to tender. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office did not respond to a request for comment.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an ultra-nationalist in the governing right-wing coalition, has said the plan would "bury" a Palestinian state. Smotrich, who is accused of pushing "extremist rhetoric," is sanctioned by Canada and several other countries for "inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank," by calling for their displacement for expanded Israeli settlements.
The tender is scheduled to open for bidding on Oct. 25, two days before Israel is due to hold a parliamentary election.
Israel's right-wing coalition government has approved a massive expansion of settlements in the West Bank.
Ir Amim said the bidding date reflected the government's resolve to push ahead with the settlement project and "create an increasingly irreversible reality on the ground ahead of the elections."
It comes days after Canada, Britain and France banned exports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank last week.
Netanyahu's actions around the time of the Palestinian militant group Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack are a key issue in the campaign.
There has been mounting criticism of the prime minister, who has rejected calls for an official government inquiry into the events surrounding the Oct. 7 attacks. Last week, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Netanyahu was directly warned by the U.A.E. that Hamas was planning a major offensive just days before the attack. Haaretz reported Netanyahu's office called the report an "absolute lie."
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and a woman hold a map that shows the E1 settlement scheme on the day of a news conference near the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on Aug. 14, 2025. (Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)Peace Now, an organization that tracks settlement expansion in the West Bank, called the project "deadly for the future of Israel and for any chance of achieving a peaceful two-state solution" which is "guaranteeing many more years of bloodshed."
Last month, British Foreign βSecretary Ed Miliband condemned Israel's launch of a tender for the E1 project.
"The impact of settler violence and terrorism has been catastrophic for Palestinian communities. Settlement expansion and attempts to create irreversible divisions on the ground threaten peace, security and the prospects for a viable Palestinian state," Miliband said.
Some 700,000 Israelis live in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories captured by Israel in 1967.
On Monday, Israeli human rights group BβTselem accused Israel's government of "rapidly and systematically dismantling all the foundations of Palestinian existence."
A new report by the organization points out five main areas that it says prove that Israel's actions in the West Bank are part of a "comprehensive mechanism of elimination," which include: violence and intimidation; movement restrictions; economic strangulation; social and political disruption; and territorial takeover and displacement of Palestinians.
It alleges that Israeli authorities use policies across the five areas to expand permanent Israeli control over the territory while weakening Palestinian communities.
B'Tselem said the use of those mechanisms has "accelerated and intensified" since the current Netanyahu government took office in 2022, but particularly following the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks.
A boy stands with a bicycle near Israeli armoured personnel carriers deployed during a military operation at the entrance of the Ain camp for Palestinian refugees, west of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on Thursday. (Zain Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images)B'Tselem said the policies are being conducted "more openly, directly and violently" than before.
Israeli authorities have generally claimed that violent settlers are a small extremist minority acting outside government policy, not representatives of the broader settler movement or the state, though the report said that settler militias are not a "rogue external force" but an "operational arm of the mechanism of territorial control."
"Official state bodies do not have to expel every community themselves. They create conditions in which armed settlers, with state backing, make Palestinian life impossible," it said.
United Nations data shows settler violence in the West Bank has reached record levels.
More than 1,260 attacks causing casualties or property damage were recorded in the first half of 2026 β about six incidents per day β while 18 Palestinians were killed in settler-related incidents by late July, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
"The current reality in the West Bank is neither a temporary crisis nor a collection of random human rights violations," the B'Tselem report notes.
"It is an accelerated and explicit phase in an ongoing project of elimination that operates within the Israeli apartheid regime and is driven by a settler-colonial logic of dispossession, displacement, and the establishment of Jewish-Israeli sovereignty."
Israel's government did not respond to a request for comment on the report.
Officials have rejected accusations by B'Tselem and other rights groups that characterize Israeli rule as apartheid or as a systematic effort to dispossess Palestinians, arguing that Israeli policies are driven by security concerns and historical claims to the territory.
Sara Jabakhanji is a Toronto-based senior writer assigned to cover news developments in the Middle East. She has worked in CBC bureaus in Ottawa, London and Toronto. You can reach her at sara.jabakhanji@cbc.ca.
