According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, thousands of hectares of Palestinian land in the West Bank have been illegally annexed by Israel. Up to two and a half times more land has been annexed for Jewish settlements than is designated for their current size. Though clearly a land grab, Israel claims the additional land it has annexed around the settlements with the expansion of the Apartheid Wall is simply a security buffer.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory ruling that the Apartheid Wall snaking through occupied territory in the West Bank breached international law and needed to be dismantled. The settlements themselves, currently occupied by 450,000 people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, are also illegal under international law.

As Israeli settlements continue to grow, the Palestinians, which own half the land, now have no access to it. Though land has been closed off to Palestinians for 30 years, the formalization of the expansion of these settlements by the Israeli military through “special security area” is a fairly recent development. Though the IDF claims these security zones are only established around illegal settlements to protect and not expand them, Jewish settlers are tolerated by the military when they build inside the zones.

Despite the Annapolis Conference claiming to freeze settlement expansion to bring about a Palestinian state, the Israeli government has done the opposite by expanding settlements and demolishing Palestinian homes.

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