Netanyahu says occupied Jordan Valley will remain part of Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the regime will never abandon settlements in the Jordan Valley, defying international criticisms of Tel Aviv’s land grab policies.

“The Jordan Valley will always remain a part of Israel. We will continue to settle it, invest in infrastructure and tourism,” Netanyahu said during a speech at a ceremony marking 50 years of Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and Jordan Valley area.

Over most of its length, the valley forms the border between Jordan to the east, and Israeli-occupied territories and the West Bank to the west. Tel Aviv occupied the region during the Six Day War in 1976, and quickly began building settlements there.

Netanyahu further describe the Jordan Valley as “a strategic defensive belt” for Israel, saying the regime will never evacuate the settlements it has build in the occupied area “because they are of utmost security importance to Israel.”

The comments came on the same day that anti-settlement monitoring group Peace Now released a new report, noting that plans for 6,742 settler units have been advanced in Palestinian territories in the West Bank this year.

Comparatively, 2,629 homes were approved in 2016 and 1,982 in 2015. Notably, some of the newly-approved settlements would be deep in the occupied West Bank.

In addition to this year’s settlement construction, another approximately 3,000 settler units have been approved by Israel for construction in the West Bank.

At the construction site of the new Amihai settlement in the West Bank, the Israeli minister for military affairs, Avigdor Liberman, underscored Israel’s resolute intention to expand settlements on Wednesday, and praised the unprecedented number of construction permits issued by officials in Tel Aviv.

“First of all, we are at the Amihai site; look around at the work that is happening here… The time has come to tell the truth. We are working at a pace that we have not seen since the year 2000,” Liberman said.

He explained that, to date in 2017, tenders had been issued for 3,000 new homes, and plans had been advanced for a total of 7,500 new homes. “Thank God, we have gotten to the kind of numbers we have not seen for a very long time.”