US envoy criticizes Israeli conduct in West Bank, settler violence

At the UN Security Council meeting, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield slams Israel’s recent conduct in the West Bank.

While she acknowledges the recent Israeli decision to extend a corresponding banking agreement for another year, which prevents the Palestinian Authority from collapsing, Thomas-Greenfield says it’s just a start given the dire economic situation in the West Bank.

The US envoy urges Israel to ease restrictions on Palestinian economic activity, including by re-issuing worker permits for well over 100,000 Palestinians that were revoked following Hamas’s October 7 onslaught.

Thomas-Greenfield slams Israeli actions that have undercut the PA and dampened prospects for a two-state solution — a framework that the current Israeli government opposes.

Israel continues to withhold hundreds of millions of shekels in Palestinian tax revenues that the US has long urged Israel to release.

She pans Israel’s recent advancement of plans for over 500 new homes in several settlements throughout the West Bank and laments that more settlement units were approved this past year than in any other 12-month period this last decade. The total number of homes advanced by the end of 2024 will be 9,221.

Thomas-Greenfield calls out continued settler attacks against Palestinians, noting that many of them have been carried out by suspects living in some of the several dozen new outposts established over the past year — hamlets that are illegal even under Israeli law, but that are rarely subject to any enforcement measures.

Last year saw the highest number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank since the UN began collecting data in 2005, she says, calling on Israeli authorities to act against the phenomenon and to dismantle illegal outposts.