The Nahal Heletz settlement shrinks Palestinian land and poses ‘imminent threat’ to a World Heritage Site.

Israel has approved a new illegal settlement on a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.

Bezalel Smotrich, the country’s far-right finance minister, said on Wednesday his office had “completed its work and published a plan for the new Nahal Heletz settlement in Gush Etzion”, a bloc of illegal settlements south of Jerusalem.

“No anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist decision will stop the development of settlements,” said Smotrich, who also heads civil affairs at the Ministry of Defence, on X. “We will continue to fight against the dangerous project of creating a Palestinian state by creating facts on the ground.”

All of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, occupied since 1967 and inhabited by some 700,000 Israeli settlers – including occupied East Jerusalem – are considered illegal under international law, regardless of whether they have Israeli planning permission.

Reporting from Ramallah, Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh said Smotrich “is flexing his muscles, telling the world that he cares very, very little about international law”.

The project, said Odeh, “devours what’s left of [Palestinian] land in the Bethlehem area, which has shrunk to nearly 10 percent of its original size”. It is located “not just in any UNESCO World Heritage Site, but also in … the only place left for agriculture, for picnics, planning and building”.

Muhannad Ayyash, an analyst with the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told Al Jazeera that Israel’s “ultimate goal” was to “expand Israeli Jewish sovereignty over the entirety of the land, from the river to the sea”.

“So, the strategic utility for Israel is always the same, whether it is in this site or another site. It’s always [to] fragment the Palestinian population and, critically, create what it calls facts on the ground […] in order to stop the creation of the Palestinian state,” he said.

Heritage site

The new 60-hectare (148-acre) settlement, which received preliminary approval along with four others in June, lies between Gush Etzion and Bethlehem.

The Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now said it will flank houses in the Palestinian village of Battir, a World Heritage Site known for its stepped agricultural terraces, vineyards and olive groves.

The group denounced the plan, calling it a “wholesale attack” on an area “renowned for its ancient terraces and sophisticated irrigation systems, evidence of thousands of years of human activity”.

Israel’s actions posed “an imminent threat to an area considered to be of the highest cultural value to humanity”, the organisation said in a statement.

According to a European Union report, last year Israel advanced plans for 12,349 homes to be built in the occupied West Bank, the most in 30 years.