Israeli parliament gives first approval to occupied West Bank annexation

A bill applying Israeli law to the occupied West Bank, a move tantamount to the annexation of Palestinian land, won preliminary approval from Israel's parliament on Wednesday.

The vote was the first of four needed to pass the law, and it coincided with the visit of U.S. Vice President JD Vance to Israel, a month after President Donald Trump said that he would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party did not support the legislation, which was put forth by lawmakers outside his ruling coalition and passed by a vote of 25-24 out of 120 lawmakers.

A second bill by an opposition party proposing the annexation of the Maale Adumim settlement — the Israeli name for the occupied Palestinian town of Anata — won by 31-9. The settlement is located 7 kilometers away from Jerusalem and is the largest in its jurisdictional area.

Some members in Netanyahu's coalition, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir's Jewish Power party and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionism faction, voted in favor of the bill, which would require a lengthy legislative process to ultimately pass.

Several members in the coalition have been calling for Israel to formally annex parts of the West Bank for years. The United Nations' highest court in 2024 said that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, including the West Bank, and its settlements there are illegal and should be withdrawn as soon as possible.

Israel argues the territories it occupied in the 1967 war are not "occupied" in legal terms because they are on disputed lands, but the U.N. and most of the international community refute this claim.

Netanyahu's government had been mulling annexation as a response to a string of its Western allies recognizing a Palestinian state in September, but appeared to have scrapped the move after Trump's objection.

Netanyahu himself has not been explicit about annexation since a past election pledge was scrapped in 2020 in favor of normalizing ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

The UAE is the most prominent Arab country to establish ties with Israel under the Abraham Accords, brokered by Trump in his first term in office. Last month, it warned that annexation of the West Bank was a red line.

Senior Emirati official Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic advisor to the UAE president, told the Reuters NEXT Gulf Summit in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday that the Gulf state believed it had averted annexation.