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AN ISRAELI MINISTER said today that new measures adopted by the government aimed at expanding Israeli municipal control in the occupied West Bank in Palestine amounted to implementing “de facto sovereignty”.
The steps, which have been condemned by the Palestinian Authority, the UN and Arab countries, were announced on Sunday following Israeli cabinet approval.
They will “actually establish a fact on the ground that there will not be a Palestinian state”, Energy Minister Eli Cohen told Israel’s Army Radio, using language that mirrors critics’ warnings about the intent behind the moves.
Cohen’s comments followed similar remarks by other members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Defence Minister Israel Katz.
The new measures expand Israel’s enforcement authority over land use and planning in areas run by the Palestinian Authority, making it easier for Jewish settlers to force Palestinians to give up land.
According to a ruling from the International Court of Justice, the UN’s highest court, Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine and the colonies (settlements) it has built there, are unlawful.
Despite this ruling, Israeli officials have pushed on with and even accelerated the expansion of settlements, approving a record 52 colonies in 2025.
On Sunday, Smotrich and Katz said they would lift long-standing restrictions on land sales to Israeli Jews in the West Bank, shift some control over sensitive holy sites – including Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, also known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs – and declassify land registry records to ease property acquisitions.
The new measures also revive a government committee empowered to make what officials described as “proactive” land purchases in the territory, a step intended to reserve land for future settlement expansion.
Under the new rules, Israelis or companies registered in their name will no longer require a special permit from the state to complete land transactions.
A government statement following cabinet approval on Sunday said the measures would “fundamentally changing the legal and civil reality in Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical names Israelis use to refer to the West Bank.
On Sunday, Smotrich said the move was aimed at “deepening our roots in all regions of the Land of Israel and burying the idea of a Palestinian state”.
Kats said “Judea and Samaria is the heart of the country, and strengthening it is a paramount security, national, and Zionist interest”.
Palestinians, Arab countries and human rights groups have called the moves announced on Sunday an annexation of the territory, home to roughly 3.4 million Palestinians who have lived under Israeli occupation there since 1967.
Officials from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which exercises limited civilian governance in the territory, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the latest plan to expand Israeli authority in the West Bank represented “the final nail in the coffin” of both the PA itself and the Oslo Accords that established the 1967 borders.
The measures will further erode the PA’s limited powers. Still, Hussein Al Sheikh, the Palestinian Authority’s deputy president, said “the Palestinian leadership called on all civil and security institutions in the State of Palestine” to reject them.
In a post on X today, he said the Israeli steps “contradict international law and the agreements signed with the Palestine Liberation Organisation”.
In a statement, President Mahmoud Abbas’s Cabinet “instructed all public and private Palestinian institutions not to engage with these Israeli measures and to strictly adhere to Palestinian laws and regulations in force”.
A group of eight Arab and Muslim-majority countries expressed their “absolute rejection” of the measures, calling them in a joint statement yesterday illegal and warning they would “fuel violence and conflict in the region”.
The only thing that can stop Israel from moving ahead with plans to annex all of the West Bank, the PA officials told Haaretz, was for Israeli allies like the United States to step in.
Today an unnamed US official told the AFP news agency the Trump administration does not approve of the Israeli annexation of the West Bank but did not criticise the Netanyahu government.
Netanyahu is due to meet President Trump in Washington DC tomorrow, which will be the sixth meeting between the two since the beginning of last year.
Responding to the Israeli government’s decision to further entrench its control of Palestinian land, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was “gravely concerned” by the measures.
“They are driving us further and further away from a two-state solution and from the ability of the Palestinian authority and the Palestinian people to control their own destiny,” his spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, said on Monday.
With reporting from AFP and Press Association
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