The security cabinet approved the establishment of 34 new West Bank settlements in a meeting two weeks ago, The Times of Israel has learned.

The approval of the new settlements — brand new settlements as well as illegal ones retroactively legalized — constitutes the largest number of settlements approved by any government at one time, the Peace Now organization said.

Security cabinet meetings and their decisions are classified, and there has been no official confirmation of the decision to approve the 34 new settlements by the government.

According to the i24 News site, which first broke the story, some of the slated new settlements are located in areas of the northern West Bank isolated from other Israeli settlements but deep among Palestinian population centers, albeit still within Area C of the territory where Israel has full control.

The security cabinet decision brings the total number of settlements approved by the current government to 103 since it took office in 2022.

This amounts to a 78 percent increase in the total number of government-approved settlements in the three and a half years of the current government’s tenure, said Peace Now, which strongly opposes the settlement movement.

By comparison, only six new settlements were formally approved by Israel in the 30 years between the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the establishment of the current government.

Only a handful of the 103 newly approved settlements have received approval through the Civil Administration’s planning processes, meaning that they have yet to be fully authorized.

But as part of its efforts to dramatically increase the number of Israelis living in the West Bank, the current government has greatly streamlined and expedited those approval processes.

According to i24, the security cabinet decision provides for the establishment of water and electricity infrastructure for the new settlements even before their approval by the Civil........

© The Times of Israel