FOREIGN Secretary Ed Miliband has called Israel’s opening of bidding on 1,234 settlement homes east of Jerusalem ‘an unacceptable and destructive act’ and summoned Israel’s chargé d’affaires to the Foreign Office to demand an immediate reversal.
Miliband said he had told his Israeli counterpart Gideon Sa’ar: ‘The Israeli government must halt E1 plans immediately, retract the tender and stop all settlement expansion.’
He promised measures in the coming weeks, among them sanctions on those involved in settlement expansion.
‘Britain will not stand back and accept the destruction of the two-state solution,’ he said.
The Middle East minister, Stephen Doughty, described the move as a deliberate act designed to undermine a two-state solution.
The tender covers the E1 area, the tract of occupied land whose development would cut the West Bank in two and sever East Jerusalem from it.
Israel’s housing ministry published it on Tuesday and opened it for bids at once. It accounts for about a third of the 3,401 units the government approved last August across roughly 12 square kilometres between East Jerusalem and the Maale Adumim settlement bloc.
Submissions close on 19th October, a week before the Israeli general election of 27th October, which will make it far harder for any successor government to unpick the contracts.
Settlements are illegal under international law. Israel has built around 160 of them, housing some 700,000 settlers, since it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, alongside an estimated 3.3 million Palestinians.
East Jerusalem was annexed in 1980 in a move almost no other state recognises. Successive governments held off on E1 for decades under international pressure.
The present one approved it a year ago, when Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, said the idea of a Palestinian state was being erased.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who has called E1 an existential threat to a contiguous Palestinian state, said that he was deeply alarmed and urged Israel to go no further.
The Palestinian Authority’s Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission warned that the plan would confine Palestinians to ‘disconnected enclaves surrounded by settlements’.
The Israeli group Ir Amim said even partial construction would create irreversible facts on the ground, cutting the northern West Bank from the south and isolating East Jerusalem.
Jamal Juma of the Stop the Wall campaign said more than 40 Bedouin communities would have to be evicted. ‘It is destruction of the communities, it’s destruction of families … this is a disaster,’ he said.
