Illegal Israeli settlers began moving into the occupied West Bank settlement of Kadim on Thursday, the local settler council said, the last of four communities from which Israel withdrew more than two decades ago to be repopulated.
It came a week after Israel officially reopened neighbouring Ganim, in a move emblematic of the current government's policy of rapid illegal settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territory.
The Samaria Regional Council, which administers illegal Israeli settlements in the northern occupied West Bank, described the return to Kadim as a "historic milestone".
"At this very moment, the families of the pioneering settler core are moving into Kadim, a community that was uprooted during the disengagement," it said in a statement.
It said that 30 families were moving to live permanently in the illegal settlement, accompanied on Thursday by far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and head of the Samaria regional council, Yossi Dagan.
Kadim is one of four illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank that Israel evacuated under former prime minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan in 2005, which also included abandoning all Israeli settlements in Gaza.
The move came partly because of their isolated location in the north of the occupied West Bank, among many Palestinian cities and villages.
Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, illegal settlement construction and expansion have surged, including with the re-establishment of all four evacuated communities — Ganim, Sa-Nur, Homesh and now Kadim.
"Twenty-one years after the crime of the expulsion from northern Samaria, today we have completed the rectification," Smotrich was quoted as saying in the statement on Thursday.
"These communities constitute a real security buffer for the entire State of Israel," he claimed, vowing to establish 19 illegal settlements in the northernmost part of the occupied West Bank.
Dagan said: "We have come home, and this time to stay and grow twentyfold."
"We are raising the flag again, closing the circle, and continuing to build Samaria with full force," he added, using the Biblical term for the northern West Bank.
Undermining prospects of a two-state solution
In comments to Palestinian news agency WAFA, Tareq Aghbariyeh, a settlement affairs official of the Jenin Governorate, described the return of illegal Israeli settlers to Kadim as a political step intended to reshape the reality of the occupied West Bank governorate of Jenin, reinforcing illegal settler presence in the northern West Bank.
He noted that the most serious aspect of this step lies in the geographic, demographic, economic, agricultural, and security effects on the governorate, explaining that Israel was seeking to impose new realities on the ground to coerce Palestinians into leaving their lands and undermine the prospects of establishing a geographically contiguous Palestinian state.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967. More than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements in the territory, which are illegal under international law, among some three million Palestinians.
Violence against Palestinians by illegal Israeli settlers has increased dramatically since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023.
