Israel Advances E1 Settlement Plan, Demolishing Shops for Road That Would Split West Bank

Bulldozers have cleared Palestinian-owned shops along a corridor east of Jerusalem to make way for a road reserved for Israeli settlers, according to a report by Al Jazeera's Leila Warah. The demolitions are part of the long-stalled E1 settlement plan, which Israeli authorities have moved to revive.

The road under construction would connect the illegal settlement of Ma'ale Adumim directly to Jerusalem, according to the report. Ma'ale Adumim sits on land Israel occupied in 1967; its status as a settlement is considered illegal under international law by the UN and the International Court of Justice, a position not seriously contested in mainstream legal analysis.

Under the E1 plan, Israel demolished Palestinian shops to make an Israeli-only road between the illegal Ma'ale Adumim settlement and Jerusalem.

The wider E1 plan calls for thousands of new settler housing units built across the corridor separating Ma'ale Adumim from Jerusalem. According to the Al Jazeera report, the project would displace roughly 4,000 Palestinians to clear space for the new construction. Occupation Watch has not independently verified this figure against Israeli planning documents, though displacement estimates of this scale for E1 have circulated in prior international reporting on the plan.

The geographic stakes are what make E1 distinct from routine settlement expansion. Building through the corridor would physically separate the northern West Bank from the southern West Bank, cutting off Palestinian towns and villages from each other and from East Jerusalem. Al Jazeera has separately published an explainer examining whether the plan amounts to splitting the occupied territory in two, a framing that underscores how central the corridor is to any future Palestinian territorial contiguity.

E1 has been shelved and revived by successive Israeli governments for more than two decades under pressure from the United States and European allies who have warned it would foreclose a two-state settlement. Its advancement now, with shops already demolished and road construction underway, marks a concrete step past the planning stage that previous iterations of the project did not reach.

The demolitions documented in the report affected Palestinian commercial property specifically, removing shops to clear the road's path. No compensation or resettlement process for the shop owners was described in the source material. Occupation Watch will continue to track further construction, demolition orders, and displacement tied to the E1 corridor as documentation becomes available.