Israel plans to double settlement in occupied Golan Heights

MEVO HAMA, Golan Heights — Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Sunday the state intends to treble the magnitude of settlers surviving successful the occupied Golan Heights with a multimillion-dollar program meant to further consolidate Israel’s clasp connected the territory it captured from Syria much than 5 decades ago.

Speaking astatine a peculiar Cabinet league being held successful the Golan Heights, Bennett said the designation by the Trump medication of Israeli sovereignty implicit the swath of land, and the Biden administration’s denotation that it volition not astatine this constituent locomotion that determination back, prompted the caller concern successful the region.

“This is our moment. This is the infinitesimal of the Golan Heights,” Bennett said. “After agelong and static years successful presumption of the scope of settlement, our extremity contiguous is to treble colony successful the Golan Heights.”

Entrenching Israeli power implicit the territory would complicate immoderate aboriginal effort to forge bid with Syria, which claims the Golan Heights.

Israel occupied the Golan Heights successful the 1967 Mideast warfare and aboriginal annexed the territory, promoting colony and agriculture determination arsenic good arsenic creating a thriving section tourism industry. The U.S. was the archetypal state to admit Israel’s sovereignty implicit the Golan, which the remainder of the planetary assemblage regards arsenic Israeli-occupied.

Bennett said the warfare successful Syria made the thought of Israeli power of the territory much acceptable to its planetary allies, saying the alternate would beryllium overmuch worse.

Israel has agelong argued that the strategically important country has, for each applicable purposes, been afloat integrated into Israel since it was captured from Syria and that power of the strategical plateau is needed arsenic extortion from Iran and its allies successful Syria.

Tens of thousands of Israelis unrecorded successful the Golan Heights, which is besides location to a fig of formerly Syrian Druze villages, immoderate of which reason Israeli control.