Israel Puts All 3,400 E1 Settlement Units Up for Tender, Completing a Plan to Split the West Bank

Israel has now put every planned housing unit in the E1 settlement project up for tender. According to Middle East Monitor, 1,234 units went to tender in August and another 2,167 in September, bringing the total to roughly 3,400, the full scope of a plan first approved by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in August 2025.

The project is no longer a line on a map. E1 is a stretch of land between occupied East Jerusalem and the Ma'ale Adumim settlement bloc. Building across it would connect Israeli construction into a continuous belt through the center of the West Bank, according to the plan's critics, separating the northern West Bank from the south and cutting East Jerusalem off from the rest of Palestinian territory. That argument is the position of Palestinian officials and allied governments; Israel has not accepted that characterization in its own public statements.

The legal objection is not new. UN Security Council Resolution 2334, passed in December 2016, holds that Israeli settlements built on territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, have no legal validity and constitute what the resolution calls a flagrant violation of international law. UN officials have separately warned that E1 specifically would undermine the territorial contiguity a future Palestinian state would need to function.

The diplomatic response has sharpened over the past year. Dozens of delegations walked out during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to the UN General Assembly, an episode widely read as a rare floor rebuke at the world body. Then, on August 21, 2026, eight countries, Pakistan, Egypt, Türkiye, Indonesia, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, issued a joint statement rejecting the E1 plan and related settlement activity east of Jerusalem.

The statement argued E1 "undermines the geographic contiguity of the Occupied Palestinian Territory" and called for the project to be halted and reversed to allow Palestinians to exercise self-determination, according to Middle East Monitor's account of the statement.

The following month, a group of countries including the UK, France, Canada, Spain, Portugal, Norway and Sweden said they intended to introduce or support restrictions on trade in goods from Israeli settlements, tying the move explicitly to preserving a two-state outcome. Middle East Monitor describes this as a group of twelve countries overall, though only seven are named in its reporting; the precise scope and timing of any resulting restrictions has not been independently confirmed.

Pakistan's position, consistent with its long-standing stance at the UN and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, is that it supports the Gaza Peace Plan only insofar as Gaza remains reunified with the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a single Palestinian territory, with E1 treated as a direct threat to that goal.

None of this has stopped the tenders. The project now sits at the stage where, according to settlement opponents, physical construction becomes difficult to reverse regardless of diplomatic pressure. Whether trade restrictions or joint statements translate into anything that slows the building is, as of this reporting, unresolved.