The Israeli regime’s cabinet has reportedly lent its blessing to the construction of more than 7,000 illegal settler units in the Tel Aviv-occupied West Bank. The Palestinian Information Center carried the report on Wednesday, citing Hebrew-language media outlets.
The report put the exact number of the planned units at 7,032. The constructions would be added to the thousands-strong similar structures that are located inside the more than 250 illegal settlements that the regime has set up across the West Bank since occupying the Palestinian territory in 1967.
Among the new units, 1,100 are slated to be built in the Ma’ale Adumim settlement in the south-central West Bank, 500 in the Giv’at Ze’ev settlement in the western West Bank, and 400 in the Kedumim settlement that is located in the northern part of the occupied land, Israel’s Channel 7 reported.
Tel Aviv has stepped up its efforts at expanding the illegal settlements since late December when Benjamin Netanyahu staged a comeback as the regime’s prime minister at the head of a cabinet of hard-right and ultra-Orthodox parties.
On January 25, Israeli media sources informed that the Israeli cabinet was planning to increase the number of the settler units by a whopping 18,000 in the coming months.
All Israeli settlements are illegal under international law due to their construction upon occupied territory. The United Nations Security Council has condemned the regime’s settlement activities through several resolutions.
The regime’s unabated construction campaign comes while the Palestinians have historically demanded that the West Bank serve as part of their future state with East al-Quds, which is located inside the territory, as its capital.
The Joe Biden administration has withdrawn its nomination of prominent human rights attorney James Cavallaro to serve on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights over the attorney’s past comments describing Israel as an “apartheid state.” He has also criticized House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s close ties to AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Cavallaro is co-founder and executive director of the University Network for Human Rights. He has previously served on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights from 2014 to 2017.
Writing on Twitter, Cavallaro decried what he described as “Censorship of human rights advocates who denounce apartheid in Israel.”
