Israel said Sunday that it would build hundreds of new housing units within the populous West Bank settlement blocs, ending a slowdown in government-supported construction that had lasted several months.
The move is meant to assuage settlers’ anger, particularly after the killings of five family members in the Itamar settlement late Friday. But it is also likely to complicate international efforts to revive the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
The announcement, which came from the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said the government’s Ministerial Committee on Settlements had decided to approve construction in Gush Etzion, Maale Adumim, Ariel and Modiin Ilit — areas of the West Bank that Israel intends to keep under any permanent accord with the Palestinians.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, condemned the decision, calling it “wrong, unacceptable and objectionable.”
“The atmosphere this decision creates is not helpful,” he said in a statement published by the Palestinian news agency, Wafa. “It creates problems, and peace requires courageous decisions.”
The government said it considered the 300 to 500 units that are planned to be “measured construction” within existing settlements.
Settlement construction has been a source of tension between Mr. Netanyahu’s government and the Obama administration. In order to avoid surprising Washington, Israel has been “very transparent with the United States” regarding its latest plans, said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu.
Diplomatically, the announcement comes at a delicate time. Last month, 14 of the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council supported a resolution condemning the construction of Israeli settlements in occupied territory as illegal, and demanded that it be halted.
The resolution was blocked only because the United States vetoed it, saying it preferred that the issue be resolved through negotiation and emphasizing that the veto should not be taken as American support for further settlement construction.
The Palestinians suspended short-lived negotiations with the Netanyahu government after a partial, 10-month Israeli moratorium on settlement construction expired last fall. They are refusing to return to talks in the absence of a new settlement freeze. And while Israel argues that there is no contradiction between building within the settlement blocs it intends to keep and resuming the peace process, Israel and the Palestinians have never agreed on the size or location of some of the settlement blocs.
The government made the announcement hours before the funerals on Sunday of the five members of the Fogel family — a mother and father and three of their children, including an infant — who were stabbed to death while they were asleep by intruders, widely suspected of being Palestinians. An estimated 20,000 people attended the funerals.
Mr. Netanyahu visited relatives of the victims on Sunday. “They shoot and we build,” he told the mourners, according to a statement from his office.
No one has been charged in the killings. Settler leaders and the residents of Itamar have called for more construction in the settlements in response.
Anger among the settlers over the lack of government-sponsored construction is not new. Mr. Netanyahu recently berated leaders of his conservative-leaning Likud Party after they pressed him for more construction, telling them that the issue was complex and that Israel was under international pressure. He told an assembly of Likud ministers and legislators, as well as some leaders of West Bank settler councils, that protecting existing construction took priority over new construction.
Some of Mr. Netanyahu’s more moderate ministers have long advocated limiting construction to the large settlement blocs.
Last year, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, the settlers began building at least 114 housing units and completed an additional 1,175 units during the settlement moratorium. In the last three months of 2010, work began on 427 new units, according to an analysis by Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group that opposes settlement construction. Most of that was private construction in small, outlying settlements, rather than state-sponsored building in the larger settlements of the blocs.
On Saturday night, Mr. Netanyahu lashed out at critics of Israel’s settlement policies.
“I have noticed that several countries that always hasten to the U.N. Security Council in order to condemn Israel, the state of the Jews, for planning a house in some locality, or for laying some tiles somewhere, have been dilatory in sharply condemning the murder of Jewish infants,” he said in a broadcast statement. “I expect them to issue such condemnations immediately, without balances, without understandings, without justifications.”
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