(Bloomberg) -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would build Israel's first new settlement in a quarter-century after thousands of security officers forcibly removed residents from an unauthorized West Bank outpost.
Netanyahu's announcement came after Israel's Supreme Court late Wednesday struck down a plan agreed by settler leaders to move some families from the evacuated Amona site to a nearby settlement, and others to an adjacent plot of land. The court said the adjacent site was privately owned by Palestinians.
The prime minister “appointed a team this evening that will advance the creation of a new settlement as the settlers were promised,” Netanyahu's office said in a text message. Israel last built a West Bank settlement in 1992, the year before the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians.
Israel has accelerated plans for construction on land claimed by Palestinians since the Jan. 20 inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has promised to be more supportive of the Jewish state than his predecessor.
Jerusalem Embassy
In the past two weeks Israeli officials have announced plans to build more than 6,000 apartments in parts of the West Bank and Jerusalem that Palestinians want for a future state. Such proposals were frequently denounced by the Obama administration during eight years of friction with Netanyahu. Trump hasn't denounced them, and has also made a controversial campaign pledge -- welcomed by Israel's government and condemned by Arab leaders -- to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, which both Israelis and Palestinians want as their capital.
The Palestinian representative to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, condemned the new construction plans in a letter to UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres, accusing Netanyahu of “blatantly exploiting transitions in the global political landscape.”
Israeli police on Wednesday evacuated most of the 40 homes in Amona, a hilltop northeast of Ramallah, and removed hundreds of youths who came to support the settlers. Most of the activists merely sang and chanted against the operation but some hurled rocks, injuring 20 police officers, according to police spokeswoman Luba Samri. At least 13 protesters were arrested.
By Thursday morning dozens of activists had barricaded themselves inside Amona's synagogue. Police tried to convince them to leave peacefully but were preparing to evict them by force if necessary.
Retroactive Legalization
Thousands of Israelis live in unauthorized enclaves like Amona that were built without following formal procedures, though government officials often knew they were being erected and provided infrastructure hookups and military protection. In addition, Israel has built more than 120 authorized West Bank settlements, housing about 400,000 people, which it considers legal but which the United Nations Security Council last month deemed a “flagrant violation” of international law.
Netanyahu earlier this week pledged to advance a law that would provide a lasting arrangement for West Bank settlements by legalizing about 4,000 homes in unauthorized outposts built on Palestinian-owned land. Construction on private Palestinian land -- as opposed to unclaimed land -- is prohibited under a 1979 Israeli Supreme Court ruling, and Attorney-General Avihai Mandelblit has said he can't defend some provisions of the bill against legal challenges. The bill is due to come up for a final parliamentary vote Feb. 6.
The legislation declares that the outposts were established in good faith under the belief that the land was not privately owned. It sets up a compensation system under which Palestinians would be given alternative properties or be paid an annual sum equal to 125 percent of the potential lease value. Palestinians describe the bill as a land-grab aimed at facilitating Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
To contact the reporters on this story: David Wainer in Tel Aviv at dwainer3@bloomberg.net, Jonathan Ferziger in Tel Aviv at jferziger@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alaa Shahine at asalha@bloomberg.net, Michael S. Arnold, Ben Holland
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