Ministers to mull bill annexing all West Bank settlements

The proposed legislation, to be discussed on Sunday, would bar restricting settlement construction due to diplomatic considerations.

By Jonathan Lis | Feb. 5, 2014 | 9:47 AM

A bill calling for the application of Israeli law to all West Bank settlements and all roads leading to them will be discussed by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation on Sunday.

The bill, sponsored by MK Miri Regev (Likud), would also bar the government from restricting settlement construction due to diplomatic considerations, unless it received the Knesset’s explicit permission to do so.

A similar bill that Regev submitted to the previous Knesset failed to pass.

Regev said her bill is meant to prepare Israel to cope with the possibility of a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood that would be recognized by most of the world’s countries. If that happened, she wrote in the bill’s explanatory notes, “It would be appropriate for Israel to divest itself of responsibility for and control over Palestinian communities in the territories of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], but at the same time, it shouldn’t abandon the communities in these territories that have a Jewish majority.

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