Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Thursday he was pushing ahead with the construction of 5,000 new homes in key areas of east Jerusalem.
On a visit to the Har Homa neighborhood, Netanyahu pledged to build the homes there and in the Givat Hamatos neighborhood. Both sit on some of the area linking the Palestinian areas of the West Bank to their hoped-for capital in east Jerusalem.
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Netanyahu pledged to turn Har Homa into a "mid-sized city," and expanding Israeli presence in the area.
Construction in the areas has previously sparked an international outcry, over the alleged blow it deals the moribund Israeli=Palestinian peace process, which has been deadlocked since 2014.
"We are connecting Jerusalem. We are connecting all parts of the united Jerusalem, the rebuilt Jerusalem," he said. "We did it in the face of fierce international opposition. We surmounted all the obstacles and we have done it."
Netanyahu said he was pushing forward with 5,200 homes for Jews in the area, in addition to 1,000 new homes for Palestinians who live in Jerusalem's nearby Beit Safafa neighborhood.
Also on Thursday, Defense Minister Naftali Bennett directed the Civil Administration's Zoning Committee to approve the construction of more than 1,900 homes in Judea and Samaria.
The plans focus on the Binyamin region of Samaria: 600 new homes will be built in Eli, 534 new homes will be built in the Shvut Rachel area, and more than 100 new housing units will be built in the communities of Tzofim, Ganei Modiin, Alon Shvutm and Nokdim in Gush Etzion, and more.
"We're not waiting, we're acting," Bennett said in a statement. "We will not give an inch of the land of Israel to the Arabs, but to make sure of that we must build. Next week I will approve many housing units in the settlement enterprise, and we will continue to act later as well. The same should be done about sovereignty – taking action in the field. For years, they explained to the settlement enterprise why everything is complicated and that the bureaucracies stuck everything, and we are stopping this.
"We are no longer in a discourse of evacuation and freezing but in one of expansion and construction. Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria is one of the building blocks of Zionism in the State of Israel. It is our pride, and instead of stopping it - we will continue to take it forward," the head of the Yamina party added.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, denounced the move as another of Netanyahu's "attempts to destroy the two-state solution and any possibility of peace."
"This is a grave violation of the international law which says that settlements in all the Palestinian territories, including east Jerusalem, is illegal," he added.
Neighboring Jordan, one of just two Arab countries to have signed a peace deal with Israel, also condemned the move. Foreign Ministry spokesman Dhaifallah al-Fayez called on the international community to "take a serious stand to stop Israeli settlement practices that undermine the two-state solution and kill peace opportunities."
