Europe's Illegal Land-Grab: The Unlawful Palestinian Settlements You've Never Heard Of – by Karys Rhea for the Gatestone Institute – 02.04.25
- Michael Julien
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Israel's complete jurisdiction over Area C, which legally includes building permits, zoning, construction, law enforcement and planning, was recognized and agreed to by the Palestinian leadership and the world at large for almost three decades. As stipulated in the agreement, only when direct negotiations determine the permanent fate of the territories that had illegally been occupied by Jordan until 1967, can the Oslo Accords be replaced. Until then, it is the law.
First, they fabricated a name for this illegal encampment to make it appear "historic": "Khan al Ahmar." From there, they complained to the media that this destitute group of Arabs were being threatened with supposed "crimes against humanity": forced population transfer and ethnic cleansing. They accompanied their manufactured narrative with images of barefoot Bedouin children, and began pumping money into the settlement, and building these "dispossessed" children a school.
Khan al Ahmar is representative of a pattern of tactics that the PA regularly employs when wresting land rights from the State of Israel. First, it identifies a strategic point located far from an existing population center. Second, it illegally seizes the land, invents a name for this "historic" village that never existed, and insists the squatters have been there since the dawn of time, despite historic aerial photographs showing otherwise. Third, it broadcasts any pushback from Israel as "cruel" and "oppressive," and "ethnic cleansing".... Then, it finds another location to invade.
As of today, the PA has built over 90,000 illegal structures and aggressively seized more than 23,000 acres of land.
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been known to partner with the PA, and it actually plowed over the royal city of Shomron (Sebastia), the seat of the ancient Israelite Kingdom and one of the largest, most important archaeological sites in the area. UNESCO has also literally "reinvented" the Tomb of the Patriarchs -- where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are buried -- as the purported tomb of a Muslim sheikh.
Attempted legal action against the EU, on the basis of its undermining the Oslo Accords, is met with the claim that its funding for the PA merely amounts to "humanitarian aid" and that the EU has full "diplomatic immunity." Carver, however, argues that this defense is invalid because the Vienna Convention stipulates that diplomats may only be granted immunity if they do not interfere in the internal affairs of a state, which the EU is actively doing by seizing land that is recognized legally as being under Israel's jurisdiction. In claiming immunity by falsely declaring that it is not interfering in Israel's internal affairs, the EU is also disregarding a foundational element of the UN charter: the principle of non-intervention.
The Europeans appear to want it both ways, on the one hand paying lip service to the Oslo Accords in order to criticize Israel, while on the other hand actively helping the PA to ignore the terms of the Accords. The chasm between proclaimed intention and actual behavior renders any commitment to peace laughable. The irony of the Europeans condemning Israel for expropriating questionable Palestinian land when the Europeans themselves are helping Palestinians to expropriate Israeli land is lost on the public at large.
Khan al Ahmar is representative of a pattern of tactics that the Palestinian Authority regularly employs when wresting land rights from the State of Israel. First, it identifies a strategic point located far from an existing population center. Second, it illegally seizes the land, invents a name for this "historic" village that never existed, and insists the squatters have been there since the dawn of time, despite historic aerial photographs showing otherwise. Third, it broadcasts any pushback from Israel as "cruel" and "oppressive," and "ethnic cleansing"
Yesterday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced their commitment to "foil what they said was the Palestinian Authority's scheme to seize land across Judea and Samaria." Most of this vast, lawless land-grab, it turns out, has been energized and financed by the European Union (EU).
For decades, members of the media, activist groups, academics, international organizations, NGOs, and countless politicians have insisted that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are the primary obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. These settlements, the assumption goes, represent an illegal and inhumane "occupation," and until they are dismantled and the territory handed over to a Palestinian state, there can be no resolution to the conflict.
Beyond these power-broker narratives exists another dimension to the story that is deliberately neglected worldwide. It is a far more labyrinthine and sinister tale -- one of stunning hypocrisy, moral bankruptcy, quasi-legal bureaucracy and colossal abuse of international law -- that exposes the questionable motivations of quite a few bad-faith actors at the core of an Israeli-European alliance supposedly based on "shared democratic values."
The deception begins with a 2009 document, "The Fayyad Plan," and ends with the unlawful Palestinian takeover of hundreds of thousands of dunams of land, with direct subsidies and encouragement from the EU. This land, under the internationally recognized and mutually agreed to Oslo Accords, rightfully belongs to Israel.
In 1993, in Washington, DC, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, a Palestinian terrorist who had been evicted from Jordan and Lebanon, signed the first and only agreement achieved between Israel and Palestine Liberation Organization, which was brokered by the United States government under President Bill Clinton, and witnessed by the EU.
In 1995, the parties signed a follow-on agreement called the Oslo II Accord, also known as the Taba Agreement or the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. A critical component of Oslo II separated the West Bank into three jurisdictions -- Areas A, B and C -- and outlined specific responsibilities and obligations of its administrators.
Area A would be exclusively controlled, both for civil and security matters, by the newly-created Palestinian Authority (PA). Area B would be administered for all civil matters by the PA while the Israeli government would maintain security of its periphery, and Area C would be solely administered by Israel until all final borders would theoretically be negotiated face-to-face with the Palestinians. In other words, Israel's complete jurisdiction over Area C, which legally includes building permits, zoning, construction, law enforcement and planning, was recognized and agreed to by the Palestinian leadership and the world at large for almost three decades.
As stipulated in the agreement, only when direct negotiations determine the permanent fate of the territories that had illegally been occupied by Jordan until 1967, can the Oslo Accords be replaced. Until then, it is the law. Unlike United Nations General Assembly resolutions, which are non-binding, the Oslo Accords are legally obligatory.
Yet on August 23, 2009, 14 years after the signing of Oslo II, Salam Fayyad, then the prime minister of the PA, published a blueprint titled, "Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State," known today as the Fayyad Plan, in which he took it upon himself to unilaterally abandon the Oslo framework and reject direct negotiations with Israel. Instead, Fayyad explicitly called for the creation of a de-facto Palestinian state in Area C.
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This article, slightly different, originally appeared as part if a 10-part series in Western Journal.
Karys Rhea is a producer at the Epoch Times, a writing fellow with the Middle East Forum, a delegate for Israel365 Action, and a Rising Leader at the Global Liberty Institute. You can find her on X @rheakarys.
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Pictured: An internationally-funded school building in Khan al Ahmar, with Israeli Highway 1 in the background, photographed in 2015. (Image source: TrickyH/Wikimedia Commons)
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