NAZARETH (Palestine Foundation Information Center) Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the confiscation of 24,000 dunums in the West Bank, classifying them as state lands.
Israeli Channel 14 said this announcement is a dramatic step, expected to affect regional planning and change the face of the region.
“At the right time, today we completed a complex process to announce 24,000 dunums of new state lands in the West Bank,” Smotrich said.
“This process creates a settlement sequence, builds land reserves for Israel to develop settlements, infrastructure and roads, and guarantees that we will continue to strengthen the settlements, and we are here to stay,” he added.
According to Channel 14, the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim east of occupied Jerusalem would be expanded by approximately 2,600 dunums to the south to create a settlement chain linked to the settlement of Kedar.
Other settlements such as Migdal Oz and Susya in the southern West Bank and Yafit in the Jordan Valley will also be expanded.
This declaration constitutes nearly half of the land declared since 1993 (about 50,000 dunums were declared as state land by last year), which makes the current move one of the largest land confiscations in recent decades, since the Oslo Accords.
