Israel's parliament gives initial nod to occupied West Bank annexation

Jerusalem: A bill applying Israeli law to the occupied West Bank, a move tantamount to annexation of land which Palestinians want for a state, 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.

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 won by 31-9.

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

Members of Netanyahu's coalition have been calling for years for Israel to formally annex parts of the West Bank, territory to which Israel cites biblical and historical ties. 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occupation of Palestinian territories, including the West Bank, and its settlements there are illegal and should be withdrawn as soon as possible.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 captured in the 1967 war are not occupied in legal terms because they are on disputed lands, but the United Nations and most of the international community regard them as occupied territory. Netanyahu's government had been mulling annexation as a response to a string of its Western allies recognising a Palestinian state in September, but appeared to scrap the move after Trump's objection.

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

The UAE, the most prominent Arab country to establish ties with Israel under the so-called Abraham Accords brokered by Trump in his first term in office, last month warned that annexation of the West Bank was a red line for the Gulf state.

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.