Israel unveils big West Bank land seizure as Blinken visits

The Israeli government announced Friday it was confiscating 800 hectares of land in the occupied West Bank, which activists called the largest such seizure in decades.

An area of about 1,980 acres in the northern Jordan Valley has been declared "state land", said far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has vowed to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which are regarded as illegal under international law.

Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now said the seizure was the single largest since the 1993 Oslo Accords, and that "2024 marks a peak in the extent of declarations of state land".

Peace Now called the timing of the announcement a "provocation" as it came during a visit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has been critical of settlement expansion by the hard-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Blinken met Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on Friday for talks which highlighted deep differences between the Israeli government and Washington over the conduct of the war with Hamas.

Israel captured the West Bank, including annexed east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and all Israeli settlements in the territory are considered illegal under international law.

"While there are those in Israel and the world who seek to undermine our right over the Judea and Samaria area and the country in general, we are promoting settlement through hard work and in a strategic manner all over the country," Smotrich said, using Israel's term for the West Bank.

Jordan condemned the new land seizure, "reaffirming the kingdom's categorical rejection and denunciation of the Israeli government's ongoing violations of all international law norms".

Despite international condemnation of a policy that is regarded as one of the main obstacles to Middle East peace, successive Netanyahu-led governments have sharply accelerated the expansion of Israeli settlements across the West Bank.

Excluding annexed east Jerusalem, they are now home to more than 490,000 Israelis, who live alongside around three million Palestinians.

The UN high commissioner for human rights Volker Turk said last week that Israel settlement expansion constituted "a war crime" and risked eliminating any possibility of a viable Palestinian state.

Since the Hamas attacks of October 7 triggered war with Israel in Gaza, violence has escalated between the settlers and Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank.

Several hardline settler leaders have been targeted with asset freezes and travel bans by Britain, the European Union and the United States for their alleged roles in the violence.