JERUSALEM: The number of Jewish settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank could grow by as much as 50 percent by 2019, Israel’s ultra-nationalist construction minister said on Friday.
Palestinians want the West Bank as part of their future state and blamed settlement expansions for the breakdown last month of US-mediated peace talks with Israel — a position supported in part by Washington, but rejected by the Israelis.
Construction and Housing Minister Uri Ariel, a member of the hard-line Jewish Home party in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative coalition government, said the negotiations on Palestinian statehood were in their “dying throes” and predicted the settler population would spiral.
“I think that in five years there will be 550,000 or 600,000 Jews in Judea and Samaria, rather than 400,000 (now),” he told Tel Aviv radio station 102 FM, using a biblical term for the West Bank, which many Israelis see as a religious birthright and security bulwark.
Ariel put the number of Israelis in East Jerusalem at between 300,000 and 350,000. Some 2.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas that, along with the Gaza Strip, Israel usurped in a 1967 war.
During the nine months of failed peacemaking, Ariel published tenders for settlement construction that were cited by the US as having contributed to the impasse.
50% more settlers seen in West Bank by 2019
50% more settlers seen in West Bank by 2019
