Israeli lawmakers on Wednesday voted in favour of advancing two bills on annexing the occupied West Bank, an ambition openly promoted by far-right ministers in recent months.
The vote came with US Vice President JD Vance visiting Israel to shore up a Gaza ceasefire brokered by President Donald Trump, who has made clear he would not back annexation of the West Bank.
“I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” Trump told reporters at the White House in September. “It’s not going to happen.”
Israeli media reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had called on MPs from his Likud party to abstain from voting.
In a statement, Likud called the votes “another provocation by the opposition aimed at damaging our relations with the United States“.
“True sovereignty will be achieved not through a showy law for the record, but through proper work on the ground,” it added.
During a preliminary reading on Wednesday, lawmakers voted in favour of examining two bills, which means they will be brought forward for further readings in parliament.
The first text, passed by 32 MPs to nine, proposed annexing Maale Adumim, a large Israeli settlement home to some 40,000 people just east of Jerusalem.
The second proposal to annex the entire West Bank was supported by 25 MPs while 24 voted against.
The Knesset, as the parliament is known, has 120 members.
– ‘The time has come’ –
Far-right members of Netanyahu’s cabinet have openly called for annexation of the Palestinian territory, occupied by Israel since 1967.
“Mr Prime Minister. The Knesset has spoken. The people have spoken,” Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich posted on X.
“The time has come to impose full sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria — the inheritance of our ancestors — and to promote peace agreements in exchange for peace with our neighbours with strength,” he said, using the Israeli Biblical term for the West Bank.
In a statement, the Ramallah-based Palestinian foreign ministry condemned the Knesset’s vote, saying it “strongly rejects the Knesset’s attempts to annex Palestinian land”.
“The ministry emphasised that the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, constitute a single geographic unit over which Israel has no sovereignty,” it said, as reported by Palestinian official news agency Wafa.
Jordan’s foreign ministry also said it “strongly condemned” the votes, which it callled “a blatant violation of international law and a grave undermining of the two-state solution”.
All of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law.
In August, Israel approved a major settlement project between Maale Adumim and Jerusalem in an area of the Palestinian territory that the international community has warned threatens the viability of a future Palestinian state.
At a signing ceremony in September, Netanyahu vowed that there would be no Palestinian state.
“We are going to fulfil our promise that there will be no Palestinian state, this place belongs to us,” he said at the event in Maale Adumim.
Excluding Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, the West Bank is home to around three million Palestinians, as well as more than 500,000 Israelis living in settlements.
Since the war in Gaza began in October 2023, violence has also surged in the West Bank.
