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Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich vowed that Israel will illegally annex the occupied West Bank in a press conference on Wednesday, touting a chilling principle of “maximum land” with “minimum population.”
In a press conference, Smotrich presented a plan for Israel to take control of roughly 82 percent of the occupied West Bank.
“Enemies should be fought against, not allowed a comfortable life,” he said, seemingly referring to the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank, which he refers to as Judea and Samaria. The “chief principle” for Israeli “sovereignty” over the region is “maximum land, minimum population,” he said, per an Al Jazeera translation.
His office added in a statement that they seek “minimum Arab population.” This is an open call for ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, and, given Israel’s current military offensives, mass killings of Palestinians.
“The goal of sovereignty is to, once and for all, remove the Palestinian state from the agenda,” said Smotrich. “And this is done when applying sovereignty to all of the territory, other than Arab population centers. I have no interest in letting them enjoy what the state of Israel has to offer.”
Smotrich presented a map showing Israel taking over the entire territory, leaving only six Palestinian cities as “ghettoes,” as Mondoweiss described it. The outlet noted that Israel also arrested the mayor of Hebron, the largest Palestinian West Bank city, on the same day as the announcement.
Smotrich claimed, as he often has, that the proposal was in direct response to the “existential threat” of numerous Western countries announcing in recent weeks that they would recognize a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly meeting this month.
However, Israel has long had a goal of annexing the West Bank. Some advocates for Palestinian rights have argued that Israel has already de facto annexed the territory amid its genocide in Gaza.
Indeed, Israel has taken massive steps toward annexation in recent months. Israeli forces and settlers have escalated violent raids in the region, leading to record death tolls, while accelerating illegal settlement expansion.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned in a report on Thursday that its field teams are already seeing evidence of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
“Palestinians are facing forced mass displacement across the West Bank, Palestine, by Israeli forces and settlers, significantly heightening the risk of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territory,” the group said.
“More than at any point in our 36-year history of providing medical and psychological care in Palestine, MSF sees how the suffering wrought by the Israeli occupation has become normalised,” MSF said. “During 2025, MSF teams have witnessed policies and practices that are blatantly designed to remove people from their land and prevent any possibility of return.”
Israel is now seeking to formalize that annexation. The Knesset passed a motion calling for annexation in July, and, last month, Smotrich unveiled a plan to revive the E1 settlement project — a decades-old plan to isolate East Jerusalem from the rest of the occupied West Bank.
Humanitarian groups and experts have called for states to stop Israel’s annexation plot. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) condemned the plan as a “red line.”
However, the U.S. is seemingly in support of the plan. Axioshas reported, citing Israeli officials, that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the U.S. will not act to stop plans for Israeli annexation.
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