New Legal Powers for Settlers Facilitate West Bank Annexation

Tel Aviv’s finance chief Smotrich favors ethnic cleansing and annexation of the West Bank as well as Gaza

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) quietly issued an order which transfers substantial legal powers over the occupied West Bank to Settlements Administration bureaucrats working under Israel’s extremist minister Bezalel Smotrich, The Guardian reports. This paves the way for annexation of the territory, illegally occupied since 1967, where millions of Palestinian Muslims and Christians live. This objective, which will eliminate the potential for a two-state solution, has been long sought by Smotrich and other far-right elements in Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.

Posted on the IDF’s website on May 29, the new order shifts responsibility for dozens of bylaws at the West Bank’s Civil Administration from the IDF to civilians working for Smotrich at the Defense Ministry, facilitating the expansion of Jewish-only colonies.

Critically, Finance Minister Smotrich also holds a position in the Defense Ministry in which he serves as de facto governor of the occupied territory, allowing him to expropriate land and expand settlement construction. He and his ultra-Orthodox settler allies aim to achieve command of the heretofore IDF-run Civil Administration, or large parts of it, as a means of gaining Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.

Since Smotrich took his position leading the Settlements Administration last February, Israel has set records for illegal settlement construction. As Al Jazeera notes, “responsibility for monitoring illegal construction in the occupied West Bank came under Smotrich. Meaning that illegal settlement or outpost construction would be ignored and eventually approved, while Palestinian construction would be subject to intense scrutiny over permits, and often demolished.”

Smotrich – himself a resident of the West Bank settlement of Kedumim – has thus far green-lit the legalization of previously unauthorized outposts, approved the building of thousands of new illegal settlement homes, and further impeded the ability of Palestinians to travel or build their own homes.

🔗SOURCE ➡️ Antiwar.com

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