Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has revived the long-stalled E1 settlement plan, authorising the construction of 3,401 homes between the Maale Adumim settlement and East Jerusalem. Announcing the decision at the site on 14 August, Smotrich said the project would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state” and claimed both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former U.S. President Donald Trump back the move. The tract, dormant for more than two decades, would create a contiguous Israeli-controlled corridor that bisects the occupied West Bank and severs East Jerusalem from surrounding Palestinian areas. Smotrich, himself a settler, said the government intends to confiscate thousands of dunams of land, invest billions of shekels and ultimately bring up to one million additional Israelis into the territory as part of what he called a push for Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank. International criticism was swift. The U.N. Human Rights Office called the plan illegal under international law and warned that potential forced evictions would constitute a war crime. The European Union, Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy and several Arab states urged Israel to halt the project, saying it undermines prospects for a two-state solution. Washington reiterated that a stable West Bank is essential for regional peace but deferred further comment to the Israeli government. E1 was last frozen in 2012 after U.S. and European objections and briefly revived in 2020. Peace Now, an Israeli monitoring group, said remaining bureaucratic steps could be cleared within months, allowing infrastructure work to begin and house construction to start in about a year. Roughly 700,000 Israeli settlers already live among 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and critics say fresh expansion further erodes any path to a negotiated settlement.