Under Trump’s Mideast vision, Israel would retain full control of the city and its venerated holy sites. The Palestinians would get a capital in the city’s outskirts, which is now made up of poor, crowded neighborhoods located behind a hulking concrete separation barrier.
The Palestinians have rejected the plan outright.
With a corruption trial looming, Netanyahu faces re-election next month in the country’s third vote in less than a year. During the campaign he has repeatedly pandered to his nationalist base of voters whom he hopes will turn out en masse to delivery him victory over his centrist rivals in the Blue and White party.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Thursday he was pushing ahead with the construction of 5,000 new Jewish homes in key areas of east Jerusalem, where critics say additional building could cut Palestinian residents off from the rest of the West Bank.
On a visit to the Har Homa neighborhood, Netanyahu pledged to build the homes there and in the Givat Hamatos neighborhood. Both lie on some of the last spaces of land linking the Palestinian areas of the West Bank to their hoped-for capital in east Jerusalem.
Netanyahu pledged to turn Har Homa into a “mid-sized city,” and expanding a presence that many believe has already dealt a devastating blow to the Palestinian dream of independence.
Building in the areas has previously sparked international outcry, which has at times reined in Netanyahu’s settlement building sprees. But emboldened by President Donald Trump’s support and his favorable Mideast plan, he appears to be charging ahead with construction there.
The Palestinians want east Jerusalem, along with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — land Israeli captured in the 1967 Mideast war — for their future state. They have long opposed construction in this part of east Jerusalem, claiming it would isolate Jerusalem from the West Bank.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for President Mahmoud Abbas, denounced the move as another of Netanyahu’s “attempts to destroy the two-state solution and any possibility of peace.”
The Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now said expanding in both of the controversial neighborhoods amounted to “state suicide.”
“Both sever parts of east Jerusalem and the connection to Bethlehem, preventing a viable two-state solution,” it said in a statement.
Israel has annexed east Jerusalem in a move not recognized by most of the international community, and it considers the entire city as its eternal, undivided capital. Upending decades of U.S. foreign policy, the Trump administration recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017, moving its embassy there the following year.
