clear

Creating new perspectives since 2009

Israel’s Defence Ministry working on plan to ‘legalise’ 70 settlement outposts

January 17, 2018 at 6:04 pm

A picture taken on February 22, 2017 from a village of West Bank shows that the expanding construction works continue at Jewish settlement of Shilo [Issam Rimawi / Anadolu Agency]

Israel’s Defence Ministry is “working on a plan to legalize 70 unauthorized outposts in the West Bank”, reported The Jerusalem Post Tuesday.

According to paper, Deputy Defence Minister Eli Ben-Dahan discussed the plan in a Jewish Home faction meeting at the Knesset earlier this week, “a video of which was leaked to Channel 2 News”.

“During his briefing to party colleagues, Ben-Dahan said that a ministerial team of four or five people had been established six months ago to identify outposts that could be legalised and to rank them by how difficult such legalisation would be”.

The paper reported that “the deputy minister said that approximately 70 such outposts had been identified, noting that some of them could be legalised relatively easily”.

‘Outposts’ refer to Israeli settlements established in the occupied Palestinian territory without official authorisation, albeit often with the aid of various state agencies.

All Israeli settlements are illegal under international law.