Haredi minister urges dramatic expansion of settlement activity on visit to recently legalized outpost

Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf calls for a dramatic expansion of settlement activity, while accompanying Settlement and National Projects Minister Orit Strock and Yossi Dagan, chairman of the Samaria Regional Council, on a visit to the recently legalized Evyatar outpost in the West Bank.

“For many years we were told that the settlements and the outposts are the obstacle on the way to peace and they slandered the settlers,” he declares, arguing that Israel’s response to October 7 “must be to settle as much of the Land of Israel as possible.”

Goldknopf calls on the government “to build settlements around the country “and in particular here in Judea and Samaria, so that there will be more Evyatars.”

Goldknopf, who heads the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, is unusual for an Haredi politician in that he has been an outspoken advocate for the settlement movement. Last summer, after Evyatar was resettled with tacit government approval, he visited the outpost and said that he wanted to see it grow to ten thousand residents, according to the right-wing Israel National News site.

He has also endorsed reestablishing Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip after the war against Hamas ends.

While the international community considers all settlements illegal, Israel differentiates between settlement homes built and permitted by the Defense Ministry on land owned by the state, and illegal outposts built without the necessary permits, often on private Palestinian land. Evyatar was one of several settlements considered illegal under Israeli law to recently receive official recognition, prompting accolades from Strock, who has welcomed what she terms a “miracle period” of settlement expansion.

Last month, Israel announced its largest appropriation of land in the West Bank since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, designating 2,965 acres of land as state land.