Israel is going to publish the construction tenders for 2,167 new homes in the strategic E1 settlement, near Jerusalem, denounced local human rights organizations. This expansion adds to the tender for 1,234 houses, announced at the end of August, which raises the number of homes to 3,401, the total planned in this controversial project, indicated this Thursday the Israeli human rights organization Ir Amim, cited by the Reuters agency and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The project, criticized by various European countries at the end of August, would split the West Bank in two and distance it from East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to one day have the capital of their future State. In practice, E1 will make the movements of the inhabitants of the different Palestinian localities in the West Bank even more difficult, but will facilitate communications between the residents of the settlements as well as their access to Jerusalem.
The tender is scheduled to open on October 25, two days before Israel holds parliamentary elections. Ir Amim has pointed out that the date highlighted the Government’s determination to move forward with the E1 project to “create an increasingly irreversible reality on the ground before the elections.”
E1 is a project dating back to the 1990s and that no Israeli government had approved. Due to pressure, precisely, from European foreign ministries. In August, nine European countries (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Norway) and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, openly rejected this plan and expressed their concern “about the unprecedented levels of violence by settlers against the civilian population” in the West Bank. Just last week, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada decided to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Under Benjamin Netanyahu’s Government, there has been an unprecedented expansion of these colonies, which the UN considers illegal under international law and a major obstacle to peace.
The NGO Shalom Ajshav (Peace Now, in Hebrew) estimates that Netanyahu’s Government approved, only in 2025, the establishment of 54 new settlements and promoted nearly 28,000 homes, more than doubling previous annual records. At this moment, and according to this organization, more than half a million Israelis live in these colonies in the West Bank, to which more than 200,000 residing in the eastern part of Jerusalem are added.
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