Israeli outpost

This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.In Israeli law, an outpost (Hebrew: מאחז, Ma'ahaz lit.

This distinction between illegal outposts and "legal" settlements is not endorsed by international law, which considers both a violation of the norms, governing belligerent occupations, applicable to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

[1] Outposts appeared after the 1993 Oslo I Accord, when the Israeli government made commitments to freeze the building of new settlements.

After then, however, settlers built new settlements without governmental decision, but often with the involvement of Israeli public authorities and other government bodies and government ministries, such as the Ministry of Housing and Construction, the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization and the Israeli Civil Administration.

[11] Although the Israeli government acknowledges that settlements built on land privately owned by Palestinians are illegal, it usually provides them with military defense, access to public utilities, and other infrastructure.

Because the difference is obscure, often disputes arise about whether new houses are the expansion (thickening) of an existing settlement or the start of a new outpost.

According to Peace Now, the Israeli government is playing a trick by legalizing outposts as a neighborhood of an existing settlement.

Since the Elon Moreh case in 1979 before the Israeli Supreme Court, the Government formally follows the policy not to allow new settlements on private Palestinian lands.

[22] As of August 2024, there were at least 196 Israeli outposts in the West Bank, reported BBC News, of which 29 were set up in 2023, a number greater than any previous year.

[24] However, the Israeli NGO Peace Now claimed that there are 45 unauthorized outposts erected in the West Bank after March 2001.

Left-wing activist Dror Etkes said, this means the state has started a process to legitimize these outposts.

[32] In late January 2012, Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed a three-member committee headed by former Israeli Supreme Court justice Edmund Levy, dubbed the “outpost committee”, to investigate the legal status of unauthorized West Bank Israeli settlements.

[33] The Levy Report published in July 2012, which comes to the conclusion that Israel's presence in the West Bank is not occupation,[34] recommends state approval for unauthorized outposts,[34] and provides proposals for new guidelines for settlement construction.