“LIVING THERE AS JERUSALEMITES”
The move comes days after Israel’s government approved a process to register land in the West Bank as “state property”, drawing widespread international condemnation and fears among critics that it would accelerate annexation of the Palestinian territory.
Days earlier, Israel’s security cabinet approved a series of measures to tighten control over areas of the West Bank administered by the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo accords.
Those measures, which also sparked international backlash, include allowing Jewish Israelis to buy West Bank land directly and allowing Israeli authorities to administer certain religious sites in areas under the Palestinian Authority’s control.
Amihai said that the current government – one of the most right-wing in Israel’s history – was “systematically working to annex the occupied territories and to prevent Palestinian statehood”.
The case of Jerusalem, he said, was particularly symbolic.
“Every change to Jerusalem is sensitive to both the Israeli public, but also to the Palestinians,” he told AFP.
Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO focusing on Jerusalem within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said the latest planned development amounted to a de facto expansion of the city of Jerusalem.
“If it is built, and people live there, the people who will live there, they will be living there as Jerusalemites,” he told AFP.
“In all practical terms, it’s basically not the settlement that will be expanded, but Jerusalem.”
