In the wake of former President Donald Trump’s re-election, Israeli settler councils have been drafting a plan to accelerate the path towards annexation of the occupied West Bank and other Palestinian territories, a Hebrew media report says.
According to a report in the Hebrew newspaper Israel Hayom, one of the plan’s most important aspects relates to future control and annexation of Palestinian territories.
The goal is to create “an operational strategy ready for implementation during a potential Trump administration.”
A high-level meeting on the matter was recently attended by Avihai Boaron, a parliament member from the ruling Likud party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several other settler councils to advance the scheme.
“We are at a critical juncture – a window of opportunity that we can utilize either wisely or squander. Taking the foolish path would merely result in 700,000 residents and additional housing units four years from now,” Boaron said at the meeting.
“The wise approach would establish conditions to make West Bank and the Jordan Valley inseparable from Israel – not just by creating demographic facts on the ground, but by fundamentally transforming the region’s administrative framework,” he added.
The plan includes widening the authority of settler councils to extend across regional council areas, effectively giving local authorities control over interconnecting areas, not just their settlement areas, in order to strengthen administration.