ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has officially moved forward with a settlement expansion plan in the occupied West Bank that would make any future Palestinian state virtually impossible.
The Israeli leader signed an agreement on Thursday to move ahead with the project, which would bisect the West Bank.
“We are going to fulfil our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us,” Netanyahu said at the event in Maale Adumim, an Israeli settlement just east of Jerusalem.
“We are going to double the city’s population.”
The settlement, on a 12sq-km (4.6sq-mile) tract of land east of Jerusalem, is known as “East 1” or “E1”.
The development plan, which includes 3,400 new homes for Israeli settlers, would cut off much of the West Bank from occupied East Jerusalem while linking up thousands of Israeli settlements in the area.
East Jerusalem carries particular significance to Palestinians as their choice for the capital of a future Palestinian state.
All Israeli settlements in the West Bank, occupied since 1967, are considered illegal under international law, regardless of whether they have Israeli planning permission.
Reporting for Al Jazeera from Amman, Jordan, because Israel has banned Al Jazeera from the West Bank and Israel, Hamdah Salhut explained that this expansion is controversial because it destroys any territorial continuity from the West Bank to East Jerusalem, further dismantling any possibility that there could be a Palestinian state in the future.
Palestinian Authority presidential spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh on Thursday insisted that a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital is the key to peace in the region. He called it and the two-state solution “inevitable” despite Netanyahu’s move.
Rudeineh condemned Israeli settlements as illegal under international law and accused Netanyahu of “pushing the entire region towards the abyss”.
He noted that 149 United Nations member states have already recognised Palestine and called on all countries that have not yet done so to recognise a Palestinian state immediately.
Netanyahu has long championed settlements in occupied Palestinian territory and fought any efforts towards peace between Israel and Palestine. He railed against the signing of the Oslo Accords, two agreements in the 1990s between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization that many hoped would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state.
“I de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords,” Netanyahu was caught on video boasting in 2001.
In 1997 during his first term as prime minister, Netanyahu helped establish the settlement of Har Homa in East Jerusalem, CNN reported. He added in an interview with the Israeli news site NRG that a Palestinian state would never be formed while he was in office.