West Bank.Israel has approved the largest expropriation of Palestinian land since 1993

Israel has approved a new expropriation of Palestinian land of 12.7 square kilometers.2024 will be a record year for land grabs.

• The plan was approved last month, but has only now come to light thanks to the Israeli non-governmental movement Peace Now.
• Previously, Israel had approved two other expropriations of 8 square kilometers and 2.6 square kilometers.
• Stephane Dujarric, UN spokesperson, spoke of "a step in the wrong direction".

Israel has approved a plan expropriation of land to the Palestinians of 12.7 square kilometers.The affected area is located in West Bank, on the border with Jordan, this is the largest land expropriation in the last three decades and will lead to the construction of new illegal colonies.

THE'UN criticized the move of the Israeli government, which had already been criticized in recent months and sanctioned by the international community for other expropriations.With this new subtraction of land from the Palestinian people, the 2024 it will be thererecord year of expropriations in the West Bank.

Israeli colonialism

The plan was approved last month, but has only now come to light thanks to the Israeli non-governmental movement Peace Now, who came into possession of the documents and disseminated them.

The expropriation of land from the Palestinians will concern an area of 12.7 square kilometers of the West Bank and it is about the largest single expropriation in the last three decades.The area will be taken away from the local communities, who will in fact be expelled to the Palestinian villages that resist and to the refugee camps, while Israel will start building new illegal settlements.In recent months the Israeli government had approved two other important land expropriations from Palestinians:one of 8 square kilometers and one of 2.6 square kilometers.Adding up all these expropriations, we can already say that in 2024 Israel will set the record for land stolen from the Palestinians.

The latest expropriation is not accidental.The area concerned is located close to other Israeli settlements and the aim is to unite them by creating a sort of Israeli occupied corridor on the border with Jordan.

Against the two-state solution

Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson forUN, spoke of “a step in the wrong direction”.But the objective of the Israeli government, in addition to creating a buffer on the border with Jordan, is broader.

As he underlined last month during an ultranationalist conference Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli Finance Minister and himself a settler, “we came to colonize the land, to build on and to prevent its division and the creation of a Palestinian state, God forbid."And then he added that he wanted to "radically change the map" of the West Bank, claiming as much land as Israel has ever done.

Israel after war of 1967 it built settlements unilaterally in these territories.Year after year they arose thousands of houses and hundreds of thousands of people have moved here.The Palestinian people living in the West Bank found themselves systematically expropriated from their land, effectively ending up living in a sort of segregation.If in the 1990s the Israeli settlers in the West Bank numbered around 100 thousand, today the number is towards half a million, plus tens of thousands more in East Jerusalem.The government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the most extremist and pro-colonization movement in Israel's history, has made its own colonization a cornerstone of his program.Today, land expropriations are reaching record numbers and this makes the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict increasingly distant.