Exclusive: Tender posted for construction of 3,401 homes in settlement designed to ‘bury idea of a Palestinian state’
Israel is moving to start construction on a vast illegal settlement in the heart of the West Bank, designed to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.
The Israel Land Authority in mid-December quietly posted a tender for construction of 3,401 homes in the “E1” project, which will effectively sever the north and south of the occupied West Bank for Palestinians, and further cut off East Jerusalem.
The tender, which has not been reported previously, lays out terms for companies to bid for part of the work, with a deadline for submissions in mid-March.
It “reflects an accelerated effort to advance construction in E1”, said Yonatan Mizrachi, a co-director of Settlement Watch with the advocacy group Peace Now, which found the document online.
“This timeline suggests bulldozers could start work in less than a year,” he added. The construction work would seal a land grab the British government has described as “a flagrant breach of international law”.
Building settlements in this area is a decades-old idea with cross-party backing in Israel, mooted initially in the 1990s by Yitzhak Rabin, the Labor prime minister and Nobel peace laureate who was assassinated in 1995 by a rightwing nationalist.
For years, construction was blocked by the US and the country’s European allies, for the same reason that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and key ministers have embraced the plan.
Both critics and supporters agree that moving tens of thousands of Israeli settlers into a triangle of occupied land between Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Ramallah would be critically damaging to efforts to reach a two-state solution.
“Construction in E1 is intended to create irreversible facts on the ground leading to a one-state reality, which all indications suggest would take the form of an apartheid regime,” said Mizrachi.
Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who is himself a settler, said last year that Donald Trump had abandoned longstanding US opposition to the E1 plan.
