Israeli occupation authorities are advancing a new settlement project to build over 9,000 housing units on the site of the former Qalandia Airport in occupied East Jerusalem.
This project is widely condemned as a land grab designed to sever Palestinian geographical continuity and further entrench apartheid infrastructure.
In a statement on Monday, the Jerusalem Governorate described the plan as a “dangerous escalation” aimed at isolating northern Jerusalem from its Palestinian surroundings. It warned that the new settlement would undermine the possibility of a two-state solution by destroying the territorial connection between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
The project targets Palestinian-owned land and is viewed by rights groups and Palestinian officials as a direct escalation in Israel’s colonial expansion. The Qalandia Airport, north of Jerusalem, once served as a critical link between the city and the wider Arab world before Israel seized control after the 1967 war.
According to the statement, most of the land designated for construction is classified as “state land” based on British Mandate-era regulations. However, large portions are privately owned by Palestinians, who would be subjected to forced land re-parceling without their consent—a violation of property rights under international law.
Haroun Nasser Al-Din, a senior Hamas official and head of its Jerusalem affairs office, condemned the project as part of Israel’s broader campaign to Judaize Jerusalem. He said the scheme was another stage in a “provocative and dangerous escalation” targeting the city and the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
In a Telegram statement, Nasser Al-Din said the settlement drive is backed by Israeli state forces and is timed to coincide with Jewish religious holidays, part of a pattern of using settler rituals to impose new facts on the ground.
He warned that these attempts to impose sovereignty through force, particularly around Islamic holy sites, constitute a flagrant violation of international resolutions and religious sanctity.
“Israel’s policy of religious provocation and settler violence will ignite the ground beneath their feet,” he said. “The continued assaults on Al-Aqsa, the arrests, the humiliations—all of it is pushing us toward open confrontation.”
Egypt’s foreign ministry reiterated its rejection of any Israeli measures that would entrench separation between Gaza and the West Bank, or that would destroy prospects for a two-state solution.
In a statement issued Saturday, Egypt's foreign minister Badr Abdelatty urged the international community to intervene to stop Israel’s settlement expansion and rising settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, Israeli occupation forces carried out a string of night raids across the West Bank over the past 24 hours, including in Hebron, Nablus, and towns west of Salfit and Jenin.
In Hebron, Israeli troops stormed multiple neighborhoods, conducted house-to-house searches, and detained several Palestinians in field interrogations.
The West Bank—home to around 2.7 million Palestinians and over half a million illegal Israeli settlers—remains a flashpoint in the ongoing push to entrench occupation and suppress Palestinian political aspirations.
Israel’s defense ministry last week began construction on a 500-kilometer wall along the Jordanian border, stretching from the southern occupied Syrian Golan Heights to Eilat—effectively tightening Israel’s hold on the occupied West Bank.
In October, the Israeli Knesset voted in favor of a bill to extend Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank and Jordan Valley. The legislation declared the territories as “an inseparable part of the historic homeland of the Jewish people” and urged strategic steps to cement this claim under the guise of national security.
Just weeks ago, the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee approved another bill allowing Israeli settlers to purchase land in the occupied West Bank directly—a shift long pushed by annexation advocates.
This is not Israel’s first push toward formal annexation. In November 2024, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that 2025 would be “the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria”—referring to the occupied West Bank by its biblical name.
In a parallel development, Republican lawmakers in the US House of Representatives introduced bills in February seeking to replace the term “West Bank” in all US government documents with “Judea and Samaria,” aligning American language with Israel’s annexationist agenda.
