After Freeze, Settlement Building Booms in Israel

By ETHAN BRONNER
NYT

JERUSALEM — In the three months since Israel ended its settlement construction freeze in the West Bank, causing the Palestinians to withdraw from peace talks, a settlement building boom has begun, especially in more remote communities that are least likely to be part of Israel after any two-state peace deal.

This means that if negotiations ever get back on track, there will be thousands more Israeli settlers who will have to relocate into Israel, posing new dilemmas on how to accommodate them while creating a Palestinian state on the land where many of them are living now.

In addition to West Bank settlement-building, construction for predominantly Jewish housing in East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to make their future capital, has been growing rapidly after a break of half a year, with hundreds of units approved and thousands more planned.

On a tour of West Bank construction sites, Dror Etkes, an anti-settlement advocate who has spent the last nine years chronicling their growth, said he doubted whether there had been such a burst in settlement construction in at least a decade.

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