Finance Minister orders ministries to provide services, infrastructure to illegal West Bank outposts

A West Bank outpost near the Jordan Valley in 2023

Hagar Shezaf and Jonathan Lis report in Haaretz on 21 April 2024:

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has instructed government ministries to legalize dozens of West Bank settler outposts in order to connect them to infrastructures, provide them with municipal services, and build public buildings.

Smotrich’s instruction effectively implements last year’s cabinet decision to legitimize dozens of illegal West Bank outposts and advance the legalization of others.

Israeli news outlet Channel 12 announced Smotrich’s decision on Saturday night. According to a political source, the measure has been advanced in accordance with “every law” as well as a clause in the coalition agreement between the Likud and Religious Zionism parties.  The document issued by Smotrich to the ministries includes instructions to match the status of the outposts with recognized legal settlements.

However, the outposts that have not yet been legalized already have infrastructures and public buildings, albeit temporary infrastructures or ones that depend on nearby settlements.

Outposts in the West Bank do not all have the same planning status; some are undergoing legalization procedures, many face difficulties due to the paving of roads on private land, or their classification as neighborhoods of existing settlements even though they are far away from them.

The legalization process of each outpost requires separate steps that can take years, because the process requires the Higher Planning Council to approve plans.  The government reached a 25-year record in the nationalization of land in the West Bank during the first four months of 2024.

Figures obtained by Haaretz show that between 2018 and 2023, about 24,000 dunams (6,000 acres) of state-owned lands have been remapped – most of them deep in the West Bank, which may indicate future plans for building settlements there.

Since the start of 2024, 10,971 dunams (2,742 acres) have been declared state-owned lands in the West Bank, a measure that enables construction there.

The Israeli Defense Ministry’s Civil Administration recently announced that it planned to expand the jurisdiction of the Shilo settlement to include the Ahiya outpost, as a step preceding its legalization and as part of Smotrich’s efforts to advance the legalization of the outposts.

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