Israel Opens Bidding on 1,234 West Bank Homes in E1, UK Calls It "Destructive"

Israel's Ministry of Construction and Housing published a tender Tuesday for 1,234 housing units in the E1 area east of Jerusalem, according to Xinhua and the BBC. It's part of a larger 3,401-unit plan the Israeli government approved a year ago. Bids close October 19, eight days before Israel's general election on October 27.

E1 sits between East Jerusalem and the settlement of Maale Adumim, covering about 12 square kilometers. Building there would connect Maale Adumim to Jerusalem while cutting off the northern West Bank from the southern West Bank, according to the BBC. Two Israeli human rights groups, Ir Amim and Bimkom, along with Peace Now, said in a joint statement carried by Xinhua that even partial construction would create "irreversible facts on the ground" that sever Palestinian territorial contiguity.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an ultranationalist settler himself, said when the project was first approved last year that the idea of a Palestinian state was "being erased," according to the BBC.

Britain draws a line, Israel pushes back hard

UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband called the tender "an unacceptable and destructive act" and said he told Israel's foreign minister that "the Israeli government must halt E1 plans immediately, retract the tender and stop all settlement expansion," according to the BBC and The Independent. The Foreign Office summoned Israel's charge d'affaires. Miliband said Britain remained committed to a two-state solution and that "in the coming weeks" the UK would "set out a comprehensive set of measures to respond to Israeli government policies, protect the viability of the Palestinian state, target sanctions at those who participate in illegal settlement expansion and support a just and lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians."

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar didn't hold back either. He said he rejected Miliband's statement outright, called it "entirely one-sided," accused him of a "patronising tone," and labeled the UK's position "absurd," per the BBC and The Independent. On X, Sa'ar wrote that "the Jewish people's connection and right to this land is the most extensively documented of any people in human history" and noted the E1 decision dates back to 2025, with tender documents only recently published. He also said the tender process had been under way for several months, and accused the UK of "blaming only Israel while ignoring Palestinian extremism."

The government approved the 3,401-unit plan roughly a year ago. Tuesday's tender is the next procedural step in a process that's been public for months. Sa'ar's argument that Britain is lecturing Israel over where Jews can live in a land with deep, well-documented historical ties is a real argument, even if you disagree with the conclusion.

Egypt and Jordan also condemned the move, with Cairo saying it would isolate East Jerusalem from surrounding Palestinian areas, according to Breitbart.

The UN weighs in, again

UN Secretary-General António Guterres, through spokesman Stéphane Dujarric, said he's "deeply alarmed" by the tender and called on Israel to refrain from further steps, citing the International Court of Justice's July 2024 advisory opinion that found Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza unlawful, according to news.un.org.

The ICJ opinion is advisory. It carries moral and diplomatic weight, but it's not a binding ruling with an enforcement mechanism, and Israel has rejected its conclusions. The UN's framing treats the opinion as settled law; Israel's government treats it as a non-binding political statement from a body it views as biased against it.

news.un.org also reported that roughly 40,000 people in Dahiriya, near Hebron, were under curfew this week after an Israeli military operation, with snipers deployed and homes used as interrogation sites, according to UN humanitarian partners. That's a separate security operation from the E1 tender, but the UN report tied both into a broader pattern of what it describes as escalating pressure on Palestinians, including comments from National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir that the UN human rights office said amounted to incitement to "atrocity crimes."

The October 19 bid deadline lands eight days before Israel's national election. Politically, that's not an accident. Once tenders are issued and bids are locked in, unwinding the process gets a lot harder for any future coalition, pro-settlement or not. The BBC noted this directly: the timeline makes it "much harder for any future government to overturn any tenders issued."

Netanyahu's government isn't hiding its intent. Smotrich said the point is to erase the two-state solution. Whether Britain's threatened sanctions on settlement-linked individuals actually materialize, and what teeth they'd have, remains to be seen. The UK said only that details are coming "in the coming weeks." Until that policy is published, it's a threat, not a policy.