Smotrich calls for Israeli annexation of West Bank in 2025

Israel's extreme-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Monday that he hoped Israel would annex the illegally occupied West Bank in 2025 and that he would push the government to engage the incoming Trump administration to gain Washington's support.

Israel's new foreign minister Gideon Saar said separately that while no decision was made, the issue could come up in talks with the future US administration in Washington.

Smotrich, who also wields a defence ministry supervisory role for settlers as part of his coalition deal with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said he hopes the incoming Trump administration in Washington will recognise an Israeli annexation push.

Smotrich has for years called for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, which is inhabited by Palestinians and was illegally occupied by Israel in 1967.

At a meeting of his extremist Religious Zionism faction in parliament on Monday, Smotrich said he had instructed Israeli authorities overseeing West Bank settlements "to begin professional and comprehensive staff work to prepare the necessary infrastructure" for annexation, according to a statement from his office.

He also said he would push the government to engage the incoming Trump administration to recognize such a move.

Saar said that while leaders of the settler movement may be confident that incoming President Donald Trump could be inclined to support such moves, the government had made no decision.

"A decision has not yet been made on the issue," Saar told a news conference in Jerusalem.

"The last time we discussed this issue was in the first term of President Trump," he said. "And so let's say that if it will be relevant, it will be discussed again also with our friends in Washington."

During his first term in office, Trump presided the most pro-Israeli administration in US history, recognising Israel's annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The United States however still officially backs a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians and has urged Israel not to expand settlements.

The occupied West Bank would make up the majority of any future Palestinian state and Israeli annexation would make the creation of such a state impossible. Israeli settlements in the territory are illegal under international law.

Smotrich's comments come as the UN Human Rights Office condemned on Monday Israeli forces’ mass arrests, ill-treatment and "gratuitous humiliation of Palestinians" during raids in refugee camps and towns across the occupied West Bank.

It said they have documented  "a pattern of unnecessary, disproportionate and otherwise unlawful force used in Palestinian communities of Madama, Dura, and the Fawwar refugee camps, among others, over the past month, despite in many cases there being no apparent threat to public order or the security of the occupying forces".

Many rights groups and analysts have said that Israel is exploiting attention on the war on Gaza to advance its settlement agenda and annexation in the West Bank.

“Over these past few decades, the Israeli occupation has been steadily advancing its geographic consolidation in the West Bank,” Ahmad Abu Al-Hijaa, an expert on Palestinian affairs, stated in an interview with The New Arab earlier this year.

He noted that while these expansionist efforts began long before the Gaza war, “the conflict has provided Israel with a strategic inlet to accelerate these plans,” effectively “annexing the West Bank under the Israeli yolk”.