Eight countries, including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, strongly condemned Israel's decision to designate some state lands in the occupied West Bank, according to a joint statement published on Tuesday by the Turkish Foreign Ministry.
Eight countries said such policies constitute a "dangerous escalation that will further heighten tensions and instability" in the territory and wider region. Eight countries said such policies constitute a "dangerous escalation that will further heighten tensions and instability" in the territory and wider region.
States' foreign ministers "call upon the international community to assume its responsibilities and take clear and decisive steps to halt these violations," the statement says.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also on Monday called on Israel to reverse its new policy allowing registration of occupied West Bank land as state property.
Guterres believes this new measure is "destabilising" and "unlawful," his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement.
Israeli NGOs have raised the alarm over the settlement plan signed by the government, which they say would mark the first expansion of Jerusalem's borders into the occupied West Bank since 1967.
Israel has occupied East Jerusalem since 1967 and later annexed it in a move not recognised by the international community. Palestinians view East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
The proposal, published in early February but reported by Israeli media only on Monday, comes as international outrage mounts over creeping measures aimed at strengthening Israeli control over the West Bank.
Critics say these actions by the Israeli authorities are aimed at the de facto annexation of the Palestinian territory.
The planned development, announced by Israel's Ministry of Construction and Housing, is formally a westward expansion of the Geva Binyamin (Adam) settlement, located northeast of Jerusalem in the West Bank.
In a statement, the ministry said the development agreement included the construction of around 2,780 housing units for the settlement, with an investment of roughly 120 million Israeli shekels (around $38.7 million).
But the area to be developed lies on the Jerusalem side of the separation barrier built by Israel in the early 2000s, while Geva Binyamin sits on the West Bank side of the barrier, and the two are separated by a road.
In a statement, Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now said there would be no "territorial or functional connection" between the area to be developed and the settlement.
"The new neighbourhood will be integral to the city of Jerusalem," Lior Amihai, Peace Now's executive director, told AFP.
"What is unique about that one is that it will be connected directly to Jerusalem, but it will be beyond the annexed municipal border. So it will be in complete West Bank territory, but just adjacent to Jerusalem," he said.