US embassy in Israel will provide consular services to settlers in occupied West Bank
Picture taken in Efrat Israeli settlement built in the Palestinian village, al-Khader, in the occupied West Bank, on 23 April 2023
Middle East Eye reports on 24 February 2026:
The US State Department will begin providing on-site consular services to Israeli settlers in West Bank settlements for the first time, according to a statement released on Tuesday by the US embassy in Jerusalem.
“Consular officers will be providing routine passport services in Efrat on Friday, February 27,” the embassy said, referring to an Israeli settlement south of the city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.
The embassy added that it planned to launch similar on-site services in several Israeli cities, the West Bank city of Ramallah and the settlement of Beitar Illit near Bethlehem. Settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law.
The announcement marks the first time the US State Department has publicly offered to provide consular services directly to settlers living in the occupied West Bank.
The US embassy’s announcement comes on the heels of an inflammatory interview by podcast host Tucker Carlson with US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. Huckabee provoked a furious response from the US’s Arab and Muslim partners when he said he would be “fine” if Israel took over a large swath of the Middle East, including Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.
That remark drew most of the media attention, but the US’s top diplomat to Israel also claimed that a wide swath of the occupied West Bank was part of Israel.
“These are Israelis who live in Israel. Area C is Israel,” he told Carlson.
Israel is also ramping up efforts to cement its control of the occupied West Bank.
In February, the Israeli government approved a plan for Israel to make and enforce decisions on civilian matters in Areas A and B of the occupied West Bank, directly undermining Palestinian Authority (PA) control.
‘Under Israeli sovereignty’
The occupied West Bank was carved into Areas A, B and C during the 1990s Oslo Accords, which established the PA out of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
The PA was supposed to exercise full control of Area A and limited control of Area B, while Area C would remain under Israeli military occupation until the signing of a final peace agreement.
In reality, Israeli settlements have mushroomed in Area C, and the Israeli government is ramping up efforts to control Areas A and B.
Contrary to US policy, ambassador Huckabee says West Bank’s Area C ‘is Israel’
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Huckabee’s statement is a glaring contradiction of official US policy, which does not recognise any Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank.
Huckabee’s statement might have been a curtain raiser to how the US views settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Both Beitar Illit and Efrat are part of Area C.
Area C comprises roughly 60 percent of the occupied West Bank. Israeli authorities and settler groups have long treated Area C as being under Israel’s permanent control, despite not officially annexing it.
The US embassy’s decision to extend consular services to Israeli citizens living illegally in the occupied West Bank is a move analysts would look towards to see if the US was treating the territory as part of Israel.
Officially, the US has refrained from recognising a Palestinian state until there is a final agreement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations called for a two-state solution to the conflict, although the Trump administration has not raised the issue.
Khaled Elgindy, a senior research fellow in the Middle East programme at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told MEE that in reality, the US was merely paying lip service to the premise of a Palestinian state.
“They are already treating the entirety of the West Bank as though it were under Israeli sovereignty,” he said. “We have already crossed over from de facto to de jure annexation,” he told MEE for a previous article.
Roughly 400,000 Israeli settlers live in Area C, where they enjoy access to services and political representation that Palestinians are deprived of, creating what critics say is an apartheid state.
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