JERUSALEM: Israel plans to declare legal four unauthorised West Bank settler outposts, a court document showed yesterday, days before US Secretary of State John Kerry returns to the region to try to restart peace talks.
Israel has been sending mixed signals on its internationally condemned settlement policy as Kerry pursues efforts to revive negotiations Palestinians quit in 2010 in anger over Israeli settlement building on occupied land they seek for a state.
In a reply to a Supreme Court petition by the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now, the government said it had taken steps in recent weeks to authorise retroactively four West Bank outposts built without official permission.
Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, condemned the move.
“Israel continues to put obstacles and to sabotage US efforts to resume negotiation,” he said. “Our position is clear and that is all settlement is illegal and must be stopped.”
A spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to comment on the government’s response to the Supreme Court.
In Washington, US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki suggested that a decision to legalise the four outposts would be counterproductive.
“We don’t accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” she said. “Continued settlement activity is counterproductive to the cause of peace.”
Most of the world deems all Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, as illegal.
REUTERS
