Smotrich: We have started the 'Settlement Revolution' and we will reach the Negev and Galilee

SadaNews - Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Monday that Israel has begun what he described as a "Settlement Revolution," stressing that this move will not be limited to the West Bank but will extend to the Negev and Galilee.

Smotrich's statements come at a time when settlement expansion is accelerating under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, which relies on the support of far-right parties that favor settlement to ensure its parliamentary majority.

The Israeli cabinet had approved, last Thursday, a plan to establish 13 new settlements in the "Benjamin" area in the occupied central West Bank, paving the way for the implementation of the first phase of this plan over the coming months.

Early on Sunday, settlers burned a Palestinian restaurant and café on the road linking the town of Luban al-Sharqiya, south of Nablus, with the city of Salfit in the northern West Bank, in an attack that Palestinians say is part of an unprecedented escalation of settler assaults, coinciding with accelerated settlement expansion and land leveling and confiscation operations in various areas of the West Bank.

This attack coincided with a series of other assaults carried out by settlers in several towns, including Anata northeast of Jerusalem, and areas in Yatta and Hebron in the southern West Bank, at a time when the Israeli occupation continues to carry out leveling operations for new settlement projects.

According to the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission, more than 3,400 assaults have been recorded in the West Bank since the beginning of the year, numbers that Palestinians consider indicative of an unprecedented rise in settler attacks, amid what they describe as a "green light" given to them by the Israeli political level.

Meanwhile, the left-wing Israeli movement "Peace Now" estimates the number of settlers in the West Bank at around 500,000, in addition to about 250,000 in the settlements established in occupied East Jerusalem.