Annexation Policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) - 2024

Palestinian territorial interests in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are declining daily as Israel relentlessly continues its settlement and annexation planned policies. Today, approximately 740,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank settlements, including 240,000 living in East Jerusalem. Israel has accelerated its settlement construction in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, to consolidate its interests and implement its annexation plans. In December 2024, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described in explicit terms his active effort to annex area C of the West Bank to Israel, compromising an area of 60% of the OPT, which is currently under complete Israeli administrative and security control.

 

Establishing a record number of illegal outposts, i.e., outposts that the Israeli government had not authorised, has become the appropriate tool for the realisation of the annexation plans that Smotrich had in mind, in addition to a sharp increase in Israeli settler violence, closures of roads and highways, and unprecedented measures to legalise and fund illicit outposts. At the same time, the Israeli government is completing an administrative infrastructure for the annexation of the West Bank by transferring powers from the Civil Administration, a military body, to the newly created Settlement Administration, a civil and political administration under the direct authority and control of Israel’s far-right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich