Britain, France, Germany and Italy have urged Israel to halt construction tenders for the E1 settlement project in the occupied West Bank, in a rare joint rebuke that indicates European patience with Israeli settlement policy is wearing thin. Canada has taken a similar stance, and by Thursday (August 20) the pushback had widened further. The office of UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced that Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway had joined Britain in a fresh joint statement branding the tender “unacceptable” and reaffirming that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law.
The breadth of the coalition – seven Western governments speaking with one voice – marks one of the most unified responses yet to Israeli settlement expansion, at a moment when European governments have grown markedly more willing to publicly break with Israel over Gaza and the future of Palestinian statehood.
What E1 is
At the heart of the matter is a 12 sq km tract between East Jerusalem and the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, itself home to more than 35,000 people. Roughly 1,234 of a planned 3,401 housing units for Israeli settlers were approved in August 2025. Should it proceed, the project would fuse Israeli-built areas into a continuous corridor severing the West Bank’s north from its south, cutting off Ramallah, East Jerusalem and Bethlehem from one another. It sits within a wider settler population that has grown to roughly 505,000 in the West Bank excluding East Jerusalem – a figure watchdogs believe is expanding roughly twice as fast as Israel’s general population.
Why it’s illegal, on paper
The International Court of Justice’s July 2024 advisory opinion found that Israel’s transfer of civilians into occupied territory breaches Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and that the settlement enterprise amounts, in its cumulative effect, to annexation and violates Palestinians’ right to self-determination. The UN General Assembly later welcomed the ruling by a vote of 124 to 14. The opinion is advisory rather than binding, and Israel, which did not take part in the proceedings, rejected its findings, arguing that the West Bank’s legal status remains unresolved and citing historic and security claims to the territory.
A three-decade fuse
E1 has been on Israeli planning maps since the 1990s and shelved repeatedly, most consistently under pressure from Washington. The current tender was approved in December 2025, postponed three times, and finally opened on August 18, 2026, with bids due October 19 – eight days before Israel’s 27 October election. Critics read the timing as Netanyahu shoring up support on the Right while making the project legally and politically harder for any future government to reverse.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has championed the expansion, has said openly that it “practically erases the two-state delusion” by splitting the territory earmarked for a future Palestinian state.The human tollA UN body has warned that 18 Bedouin communities, including the 250-strong Khan al-Ahmar, face displacement if construction goes ahead. These are communities that are already worn down by decades of demolitions. Aid agencies have documented a July 2026 attack by settlers on a Bedouin community inside the E1 area, in which water pipelines were damaged and grazing land access restricted.
The Palestinian Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission has separately warned the plan would confine Palestinians to “disconnected enclaves surrounded by settlements”.
The diplomatic response
Britain has led it, summoning Israel’s ambassador and with Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband calling the tender “an unacceptable and destructive act” and telling Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar directly that “the Israeli Government must halt E1 plans immediately, retract the tender and stop all settlement expansion”. In their joint statement, the UK, Germany, France and Italy warned the plans would take the region “further from peace” and “further undermine Israel’s international standing”. Israeli media, citing Western diplomats, have reported the EU is drawing up a possible sanctions package, including labelling all Israeli goods and scaling back academic and security cooperation, should construction begin, and with Washington not standing in the way.
The Trump administration itself has stopped short of condemning the tender directly, though it has repeatedly said that it opposes West Bank annexation. That gap has drawn fire at home: dozens of US lawmakers have pressed the State Department to match its rhetoric with pressure on Israel, warning that the window to stop the project is closing.
Israel’s response
Sa’ar dismissed Britain’s objections on X, writing that “the Jewish people have the right to live throughout the Land of Israel, just as the British have the right to live in London and throughout the United Kingdom”. He accused London of fixating on Israeli actions while ignoring Palestinian extremism, and warned the criticism could strain bilateral relations.The episode is shaping up as a test of Western resolve: whether a widening bloc of Israel’s longest-standing allies is prepared to back its words with consequences — sanctions, trade measures, diplomatic costs — or whether E1, like previous iterations of the plan, proceeds regardless of the noise.
