The Israeli parliament (Knesset) approved this Wednesday, October 22, in a preliminary reading, a proposal to annex the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank by the difference of one vote.
“The bill to apply sovereignty to the territories of Judea and Samaria was approved in preliminary reading by a majority of 25 in favor and 24 against,” announced the 120-member Knesset, according to Spanish news agency EFE.
Judea and Samaria is the Israeli administrative designation for much of the West Bank, rather than the name given by Jordan to the west bank of the Jordan River, when it annexed Palestinian territory between 1950 and the Israeli occupation in 1967.
This Wednesday’s vote is the first step that precedes three other votes necessary for the Israeli parliament to convert the project into law.
“The State of Israel will apply its laws and sovereignty to the settlement areas in Judea and Samaria, to establish the status of these areas as an inseparable part of the sovereign State of Israel,” the bill reads.
The legislative project was proposed by the leader and only deputy of the Noam party, Avigdor Maoz, who alluded to the idea of “Greater Israel”, which erases the Palestinian territories from the map, during the parliamentary debate.
“The Lord, blessed be he, gave the Land of Israel to the people of Israel,” he explained.
The preliminary vote coincided with the visit to Israel of the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, who analyzed the ceasefire plan in Gaza with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior military officials.
“The time has come to apply full sovereignty over all the territories of Judea and Samaria, the heritage of our ancestors”, applauded the Minister of Finance, the ultra-rightist and settler, Bezalel Smotrich, on social media.
Smotrich added that it is time to “promote peace-for-peace agreements” with Israel’s neighbors “from a position of strength.”
The Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, also far-right and a settler, was equally pleased with the bill.
“The time for sovereignty has now arrived,” he wrote on social media.
The two ministers had already demanded that Netanyahu annex the West Bank in September in response to the recognition of the Palestinian state by more than a dozen countries, including Portugal, France, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
Smotrich (Religious Zionist Party, also known as Tkuma) and Ben Gvir (Otzma Yehudit, Jewish Power) are partners with Netanyahu’s Likud, in the right-wing and far-right government coalition in power since the 2022 elections.
Palestine has no territorial continuity and, while the political arm of Hamas governed in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian National Authority (ANP), led by Mahmoud Abbas, remains in the West Bank.
Headquartered in Ramallah, the ANP is recognized by the international community as a representative of the Palestinians.
Since the second Oslo Agreement in 1995, Israel has had military and civil control over the so-called Area C of the West Bank, which is equivalent to 60% of the territory.
The ANP has full control of Area A and civilian control of Area B, where it shares security control with Israel.
Additionally, there are hundreds of Israeli military checkpoints throughout the West Bank.
There is also a permit system in place that does not allow Palestinians to move freely between cities and prohibits many from entering Jerusalem, among other cities.