JERUSALEM, September 11, 2025 (WAFA) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday evening signed off on the so-called E1 plan, a colonial expansion project aimed at enlarging settlements on occupied West Bank land surrounding Jerusalem.
The plan seeks to isolate occupied Jerusalem from its Palestinian surroundings, sever geographic and demographic continuity between the city and nearby Palestinian communities, and undermine the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. It would also fragment the West Bank by separating its northern and southern regions into disconnected enclaves under Israeli control.
The project expands Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries by annexing the Ma’ale Adumim colonial bloc, which would displace and uproot Palestinian Bedouin communities from their lands while increasing the number of colonists at the expense of indigenous Palestinians. Entire Palestinian neighborhoods such as Kafr Aqab, Anata, and Shu’fat face exclusion and isolation under the plan.
Earlier in the day, the Palestinian Authority's Jerusalem Governorate warned of a parallel agreement between the occupation government and the Ma’ale Adumim settlement municipality, allocating about 3 billion shekels for infrastructure projects to pave the way for more than 7,600 colonial housing units, including 3,400 in the E1 area east of Jerusalem.
The agreement, signed in the presence of Netanyahu, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the so-called Ministry of Housing, Knesset members, and settler organizations, is intended to accelerate settlement expansion by linking Ma’ale Adumim with the Mishor Adumim industrial zone and other recently approved projects in E1.
Described as the largest such plan in the West Bank since a similar 2018 agreement worth 338 million shekels for Ma’ale Adumim, the E1 project covers 12,000 dunums of confiscated Palestinian land belonging to the towns of Issawiya, At-Tur, Anata, Al-Eizariya, and Abu Dis. It aims to create direct territorial continuity between Ma’ale Adumim and occupied Jerusalem, effectively cutting the city off from its Palestinian hinterland and severing the northern and southern West Bank.
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