With Israel’s elections approaching, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has unveiled a plan to expand Jewish settlement in the Negev and Galilee, drawing comparisons with the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
“Today I present … the plan for the Judaisation of the Negev and Galilee,” Mr Smotrich said in a post on X, referring to the West Bank by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria. He said the government would replicate what he described as a “revolution” in the West Bank on a much larger scale in the two regions.
His Religious Zionism party also shared an AI-generated video depicting two Arab men reacting emotionally to the proposed plan.
The Negev in southern Israel and the Galilee in the north have sizeable Arab-Israeli populations. Most members of Israel’s Arab minority identify as Palestinian and are descendants of Palestinians who remained in what is now Israel following its establishment in 1948. They account for around 21 per cent of Israel’s population of 10.2 million.
Mr Smotrich said the plan aimed to bring an additional one million Jews to the Negev and Galilee, establish 40 new communities, develop dozens of farms, expand existing settlements and construct hundreds of thousands of housing units.
He also said the government would scrap what he called “reckless plans” in Arab communities that had taken over land reserves and posed a threat to Jewish settlement in the regions.
The minister pledged to establish new industrial and employment zones and said his party would push the next government to “remove barriers” and appoint Zionist professionals to key positions.
Israel is set to hold elections on Oct 27, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu facing a challenging campaign. Current opinion polls indicate that Smotrich’s party, a member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, is close to the electoral threshold required to secure seats in parliament.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967. More than 500,000 Israelis currently live in settlements there, which are considered illegal under international law. The territory is home to around three million Palestinians.
Meanwhile, Israeli strikes in Gaza killed at least three people on Thursday, according to the territory’s civil defence agency, while the Israeli military said it had targeted Hamas positions.
The civil defence agency said a man died from injuries sustained in an Israeli drone strike on a house in the Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City.
Another man was killed when an Israeli strike hit his tent in the Al-Mawasi area, east of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, it said.
A third person was killed and several others wounded in a strike near an intersection in western Gaza City.
Medics separately reported that an Israeli airstrike killed one person near Qarara town in southern Gaza, while another strike killed a man at a house in the Beach refugee camp in Gaza City.
Later on Thursday, another Israeli airstrike hit a vehicle in Gaza City, killing one person, according to medics.
