May 29, Kathmandu- Israel said on Thursday it would establish 22 Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. It also includes the legalization of outposts built without government permission.

Israel captured the West Bank, along with the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, in the 1967 Middle East war, and the Palestinians want all three areas for their future state.

Most of the international community views the settlements as illegal and an obstacle to resolving the decades-old conflict.

Defense Minister Israel Katz, using the biblical term for the West Bank, said they “strengthen our hold on Judea and Samaria,” “establish our historic right to the land of Israel, and are a repressive response to Palestinian terrorism.”

He also said it was a “strategic step to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state that would threaten Israel.”

Israel has already built more than a hundred settlements in this area. About half a million settlers live there. The settlements range from small hilltop outposts to fully developed communities with apartment blocks, shopping malls, factories and public parks.

The West Bank is home to three million Palestinians. They live under Israeli military rule in population centers administered by the Western-backed Palestinian Authority. Settlers have Israeli citizenship.

Israel has been ramping up settlement construction in recent years, confining Palestinians to smaller and smaller areas of the West Bank and making the prospect of a viable, independent state more remote, long before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Gaza began.

In his first term, US President Donald Trump's administration broke with decades of US foreign policy by supporting Israel's claims to territory it had forcibly occupied and taking steps to legalize settlements.

Former President Joe Biden, like most of his predecessors, opposed the settlements but put less pressure on Israel to stop their growth.

The UN's top court ruled last year that Israel's presence in the occupied Palestinian territories was illegal and called for an end to it and an immediate halt to settlement construction.

Israel has condemned the non-binding opinion of a 15-judge panel of the International Court of Justice, saying the territories are part of the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

– Call for settlements in war-torn Gaza –

Israel withdrew its settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005, but leading figures in the current government have called for them to be re-established and for the territory’s large Palestinian population to be resettled elsewhere, describing them as voluntary displacement.

Palestinians view such plans as a blueprint for forced evictions from their homeland, and experts say they could violate international law.

Israel now controls more than 70 percent of Gaza, according to Yaakov Garb, a professor of environmental studies at Ben-Gurion University who has studied Israeli-Palestinian land use patterns for decades.

The area includes a buffer zone along the border with Israel, as well as the now mostly uninhabited southern city of Rafah and other large areas that Israel has ordered evacuated.