The bulldozers have not stopped. Through every diplomatic cycle, every ceasefire announcement, every round of international concern, Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank has continued — and in several critical zones, it has accelerated sharply. Understanding where Israeli settlement expansion is fastest means looking at three overlapping geographies: the E1 corridor east of Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, and the ring of communities encircling East Jerusalem. Together, they trace the outline of a Palestinian state that is being made physically impossible to build.
E1: The Corridor That Cuts the West Bank in Two
The E1 area — a roughly 12-square-kilometre wedge of land running east from the Ma’ale Adumim settlement bloc toward the Jordan Valley — has been the subject of international alarm for decades, and for good reason. Construction here would sever the northern West Bank from the southern West Bank, eliminating any viable territorial contiguity for a future Palestinian state. The United States and the European Union have repeatedly warned Israeli governments against building in E1; for years, those warnings produced a kind of frozen standoff.
That standoff has eroded. In February 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who was granted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extraordinary authority over the Civil Administration, the body that administers Israeli planning in the West Bank — advanced planning steps for approximately 9,000 housing units in E1 and the surrounding Ma’ale Adumim bloc. Peace Now, which tracks settlement construction through Israeli planning records and tender data, documented the advancement and characterized it as one of the most significant planning approvals for E1 in the bloc’s history.
The legal architecture of E1 construction matters. Under the Oslo-era zoning framework, most of E1 falls in Area C — the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli civil and security control — meaning Israel can advance planning there without Palestinian Authority coordination. The Palestinian community of Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin village sitting directly in the path of E1 development, has faced demolition orders for years. The International Court of Justice‘s July 2024 advisory opinion, which found Israel’s occupation and settlement enterprise to be unlawful under international law, specifically referenced the fragmentation of Palestinian territory as a key element of that illegality.
The Jordan Valley: Quiet Annexation Through Expansion
If E1 is the most symbolically charged settlement zone, the Jordan Valley is where the facts on the ground have been most systematically constructed. The valley — stretching along the western bank of the Jordan River and comprising roughly 30 percent of the West Bank — is home to approximately 11,000 Israeli settlers spread across more than 30 settlements and outposts, while Palestinian residents, numbering in the tens of thousands, live under severe restrictions on movement, water access, and building rights, according to OCHA oPt.
Settlement construction in the Jordan Valley accelerated after Israel’s formal declaration, under the Netanyahu government, of intent to apply Israeli sovereignty there — a declaration that stopped short of formal annexation but signaled a political direction. Outposts including Mevoot Yericho and Maskiot have expanded their physical footprint in recent years. Peace Now data for 2023 and 2024 recorded significant construction tenders in the valley, including plans for hundreds of new units in Beka’ot and Ro’i. Crucially, Palestinian agricultural communities in the valley — including herding communities in Fasayil, Al-Jiftlik, and the northern Jordan Valley — face ongoing demolition orders, with OCHA documenting dozens of demolitions of Palestinian structures annually in the area.
The strategic logic is explicit in Israeli planning documents: the Jordan Valley is defined as a security border, and settlement density there is designed to prevent any future Palestinian control of the area. Scholars including Rashid Khalidi have argued that the valley’s settlement geography, combined with the network of Israeli-controlled roads bisecting it, renders Palestinian sovereignty there a geographic fiction regardless of any future political agreement.
The Ring Around East Jerusalem
East Jerusalem and its immediate surroundings constitute the third, and in some ways most densely contested, zone of rapid expansion. The ring of settlements encircling the city — Har Homa (Jabal Abu Ghneim), Gilo, Ramot, Neve Ya’akov, Pisgat Ze’ev, and the newer Givat Hamatos — has been designed, planners and analysts at Ir Amim have documented, to sever East Jerusalem’s demographic and geographic links with the surrounding West Bank.
Givat Hamatos, a planned settlement of up to 3,000 units on land between East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, received renewed planning approvals in 2023. Its construction would close the last open corridor between East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, according to Ir Amim. Meanwhile, construction in Har Homa continued, with new tenders issued through the Israeli Housing Ministry. The combination of these projects with accelerated building in the E1 corridor would, in effect, create a continuous belt of Israeli-controlled territory cutting East Jerusalem off from Palestinian communities to the north, south, and east.
Within East Jerusalem itself, settlement activity — including settler takeovers of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, and the Old City’s Muslim Quarter — has proceeded through a combination of Israeli legal mechanisms and settler organizations. Adalah and Al-Haq have both documented the legal instruments — the 1950 Absentee Property Law, the Legal and Administrative Matters Law — through which Palestinian property in East Jerusalem has been transferred to settler organizations.
Smotrich and the Outpost Legalization Wave
Underpinning activity across all three zones is a structural shift in how settlement expansion is authorized. Since taking control of settlement planning in early 2023, Finance Minister Smotrich has pursued an aggressive program of outpost legalization — converting informal settler outposts, many established without formal Israeli government authorization, into recognized settlements with full planning rights.
Between 2023 and early 2025, Peace Now documented the legalization or advancement toward legalization of more than a dozen outposts across the West Bank, including Meitarim Farm (near Hebron), Nahalat Yosef (near Nablus), and several outposts in the Jordan Valley. Each legalization unlocks access to Israeli government infrastructure funding — roads, water lines, electricity — that cements permanence. The UN Security Council, in Resolution 2334 (2016), had already affirmed that all Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, constitute a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. Subsequent UN bodies have reiterated that characterization; the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion gave it the force of the court’s formal legal analysis.
The pace matters as much as the scale. UNCTAD and Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) data consistently show that the settlement footprint — including settlements, outposts, and their associated “jurisdictional areas” — already covers a substantial portion of Area C, leaving Palestinian communities fragmented in shrinking enclaves. For Palestinians in villages adjacent to E1, in the Jordan Valley, and in East Jerusalem’s severed neighborhoods, the construction is not an abstract geopolitical statistic. It is the view from their window, the road they are barred from, the land that was plowed this season by someone who arrived last year.
Sources
- Peace Now – Settlement Construction Data and Tenders, 2023–2025
- UN OCHA oPt – Area C and Jordan Valley Humanitarian Reports
- International Court of Justice – Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Occupation, July 2024
- Ir Amim – East Jerusalem Settlement Mapping and Analysis
- Adalah – Legal Instruments Used in East Jerusalem Property Transfers
- Al-Haq – Documentation of Settlement Expansion and Property Law
- UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016)
- UNCTAD – Economic Cost of Occupation Reports
- Khalidi, Rashid – The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), Metropolitan Books
