Israel will expand the borders of Jerusalem for the first time since 1967, a leading anti-settlement group warned on Monday, in the latest move this month indicating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government plans to annex the occupied West Bank.
In a development that the Peace Now watchdog called “carrying out de facto annexation through the back door”, Israel’s Ministry of Construction and Housing announced last week that it would invest 120 million shekels ($39 million) to build infrastructure for a new neighbourhood for the occupied West Bank settlement of Adam, north-east of Jerusalem.
Peace Now accused the government of using the project to expand Jerusalem's municipal boundaries, without explicitly announcing the far more controversial move.
The designation of a new neighbourhood for Adam is “merely a pretext intended to conceal a move that effectively applies Israeli sovereignty to areas of the West Bank”, Peace Now said in a statement released on Monday.
“Because formally expanding Jerusalem’s municipal boundary into the West Bank would constitute official annexation, the plan was designed to be classified as a 'neighbourhood' of the Adam settlement and, officially, not part of Jerusalem."
“In reality, however, there is no possible physical connection between the Adam settlement and the new settlement area, as they are separated by the separation barrier and an intercity road.”
Channel 12 analyst Amit Segal, who in Israel is widely considered one of the most important pro-Netanyahu media figures, described the decision as “par for the annexation course” in a post on X, and added that “the dream of Greater Jerusalem is alive and well”.
The expansion of Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries for the first time since the 1967 war, when Israel took full control of the city and occupied the West Bank, would be a massive escalation in the conflict.
East Jerusalem is supposed to form the capital of a Palestinian state under the Oslo Accords, which remain the preferred route to ending the Israel-Palestine conflict for most of the international community.
By unilaterally expanding the city’s borders with new neighbourhoods, Israel would further cut off Palestinian East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, making a future Palestinian state untenable.
Campaigners say Israeli authorities are engaged in other projects to isolate East Jerusalem, and to split the rest of the West Bank in two. These include tourism projects, road construction and new residential settlements.
Successive Israeli governments have continued to expand settlements, despite most of the international community and major legal bodies calling them illegal. Settlement activity has accelerated under Mr Netanyahu’s government, which contains many settler extremists for whom annexation of the West Bank is a policy priority.
Settlements are now home to hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians, a reality that is widely considered one of the main impediments to the future of a Palestinian state.
Peace Now said on Monday that construction of the new neighbourhood could begin within the next two years. The area is “apparently intended for the ultra-Orthodox population”, it said.
A day earlier, the government approved a plan to allow land registration in the West Bank for the first time since 1967, which gives Israeli authorities power to irreversibly determine ownership of land in the Palestinian territory.
The Palestinian Presidency said the move was a “grave escalation” that “signals the beginning of the implementation of annexation plans”.
Similar registration processes in East Jerusalem in recent years paint a picture of what could come in the occupied West Bank, according to Michal Braier of Israeli human rights organisation Bimkom.
“Most of the land that has been registered in East Jerusalem since that process started in 2018 has been for state infrastructure, older settlements, or new settlements. We’ve seen very clearly that Israeli authorities are only doing land registration processes where they think they can get land for Israeli settlement,” she told The National.
Last week, the government also revealed measures to make it easier for Israelis to buy Palestinian land in the West Bank and for the state to exercise more control over sensitive religious sites at the expense of Palestinian authorities.
The measures sparked widespread condemnation from Arab and western states, who called on Israel to respect Palestinian territorial rights. The US also reiterated its opposition to annexation of the West Bank.
