Israel announces major expansion of West Bank settlements

JERUSALEM, May 29 (BBC/AFP): Israeli ministers say 22 new Jewish settlements have been approved in the occupied West Bank - the biggest expansion in decades.

Several already exist as outposts, built without government authorisation, but will now be made legal under Israeli law. Others are completely new, according to Defence Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

Settlements - which are widely seen as illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this - are one of the most contentious issues between Israel and the Palestinians.

Katz said the move "prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel", while the Palestinian presidency called it a "dangerous escalation".

The Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now called it "the most extensive move of its kind" in more than 30 years and warned that it would "dramatically reshape the West Bank and entrench the occupation even further".

Israel's approval of 22 new settlements in the occupied West Bank is a "deliberate obstacle to Palestinian statehood", Britain's Middle East minister Hamish Falconer said Thursday.

"The UK condemns these actions," he wrote on X. "Settlements are illegal under international law, further imperil the two state solution, and do not protect Israel."

Israel has built about 160 settlements housing some 700,000 Jews since it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem - land Palestinians want, along with Gaza, for their hoped-for future state - in the 1967 Middle East war.

Successive Israeli governments have allowed settlements to grow. However, expansion has risen sharply since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in late 2022 at the head of a right-wing, pro-settler coalition, as well as the start of the Gaza war, triggered by Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.

Hamas Gaza chief

Sinwar killed

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that Mohammad Sinwar, Hamas' Gaza chief and the younger brother of the Palestinian militant group's deceased leader and mastermind of the October 2023 attack, Yahya Sinwar, had been killed.

Mohammad Sinwar had been the target of an Israeli strike on a hospital in southern Gaza earlier this month and Netanyahu said on May 21 that it was likely he was dead.

The Israeli leader announced that Sinwar had been "eliminated" in an address to the Israeli parliament as he listed off names of other Hamas officials that Israel had killed over the past 20 months, including Sinwar's brother Yahya.

"In the last two days we have been in a dramatic turn towards a complete defeat of Hamas," he said, adding that Israel was also "taking control of food distribution", a reference to a new aid distribution system in Gaza managed by a US-backed group.

Hamas has yet to confirm Sinwar's death.