Israel has served up plans for thousands of homes across the West Bank in the first announcement of settlement construction since President Donald Trump urged a building freeze in February.
"After dozens of years, I'm honored to be the prime minister who builds a new settlement in Judea and Samaria", Netanhayu said on Twitter, referring to the biblical names of the West Bank.
Despite global opposition to Israeli settlement construction, which is illegal under worldwide law, ground was broken at the site of the proposed Amichai settlement, which is meant to accommodate settlers who the Israeli High Court evicted from the illegal Amona outpost earlier this year. In his own trip to the region last month, Trump said nurturing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia could help produce the wider Mideast pact that former U.S. President Barack Obama and his predecessors failed to deliver. He appears to have backtracked since.
Palestinians and most of the global community consider settlements built in territory captured by Israel after the 1967 war as illegal under worldwide law.
The prime minister added that there was not, and there would never be, as good a government for the settlements as theirs.
Netanyahu had vowed to compensate the residents of Amona with the new settlement, built on a nearby site in the northern West Bank.
Daghlas said the razing of the said lands comes following an Israeli governmental decision last March to seize around 977 dunums of land to build a new settlement. That evening he visited the family of Hadas Malka, 23, who was killed in the Old City of Jerusalem on Friday evening as she responded to another Palestinian attack nearby.
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But Trump has made a slight about-face about health care reform since cheering the House bill during a Rose Garden ceremony. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the House bill would cause 23 million people to lose coverage by 2026.
Trump administration officials have said that if they are going to make progress on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, they do not want to get bogged down in process but to move more rapidly toward resolving what are known as "final status" issues, the complexities around Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, water resources, security and borders.
A Palestinian official denounced the ground-breaking as a "grave escalation" and an attempt to thwart peace efforts.
Since then, Palestinian assailants have killed 43 Israelis, two visiting Americans and a British student, mainly in stabbing attacks.
The incident was the latest in a wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians that started since mid-September.
US President Donald Trump is seeking to restart peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians - stalled since talks collapsed in 2014. Some 250 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire during the same period, a lot of them identified as attackers by Israel.
The global community regards all Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories to be illegal and a major obstacle to Middle East peace.
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