Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, speaks with Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich during the weekly cabinet meeting at the Defence Ministry in Tel Aviv, Israel, Sunday Jan. 7, 2024.Ronen Zvulun/AP
The Israeli government approved a proposal for 19 new settlements in the occupied West Bank in a blatant violation of international humanitarian law.
The country’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said on X that this increases the total number of new settlements to 69 in the past three years—a new record.
“On the ground, we are blocking the establishment of a Palestinian terror state,” he said in his announcement on Sunday.
According to the Associated Press, citing Peace Now, an Israeli watchdog group that works to prevent settlement expansion, there are now 210 settlements in the West Bank.
Ramiz Alakbarov, deputy special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process in the United Nations, said on Tuesday that Israeli settlement expansion “fuels tensions, impedes Palestinian land access, and threatens the viability of a contiguous and sovereign Palestinian State.”
A Saturday report from the New York Times that tracked Israel’s assault on the West Bank described a general pattern that settlers have employed to take over the land: an outpost unauthorized by Israeli law is established in the form of a tent or trailer, military orders call for Palestinian communities to evacuate, and the outpost grows and eventually the Israeli government authorizes the settlement.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right administration has accelerated this settlement expansion. According to Peace Now, in the past two years, Israelis have built around 130 new outposts—more than the number established in the previous two decades.
This settler campaign has led to attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank. According to the United Nations, in the first half of 2025, there were 757 settler attacks that caused casualties or property damage.
Between October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas-led attack that sparked the war in Gaza, and this October, Israeli attacks in the occupied West Bank have killed around 1,001 Palestinians—with one in five being children, according to the UN.
Ajith Sunghay, the head of the UN’s office for human rights in Palestine, said that Israel “has a legal obligation to end the occupation and reverse the annexation” and demanded that member states “halt and reverse these policies and ensure accountability for decades of violations.”
