JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will expedite planning for some 1,000 settler homes in East Jerusalem, a government official said yesterday, in a bid to placate a restive coalition ally without further aggravating a dispute with Washington.
The ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party, led by Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, has been issuing veiled threats to sever its political partnership with Netanyahu unless he agrees to its call for 2,000 new building tenders in settlements in the occupied West Bank.
But Netanyahu, just hours before the opening of parliament’s winter session, sidestepped the demand. The government official said Netanyahu ordered the “planning of some 1,000 new units in Jerusalem – approximately 400 units in Har Homa and 600 units in Ramat Shlomo – to be advanced”.
There was no public pledge to actually erect them, and Pepe Alalu, a left-wing member of the Jerusalem municipality’s planning and housing committee, said the proposed projects in the two settlements, in areas of the West Bank that Israel captured in a 1967 war and annexed to the city, were not new.
“The plans have existed for a long time,” Alalu told Reuters, adding that no building permits had been issued.
