Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in London. I'm Tim Franks.

We're beginning with a major development with Israel and the Palestinians. And yes, I am saying Palestinians because we're not just going to be talking about Gaza, although we'll get on to that in a moment with another day of chaos around the distribution of aid to the starving

people there. But we're going to begin by looking not south to the Gaza Strip, but east, to what's

called the West Bank, the West Bank of the Jordan River, in other words, where the majority of

Palestinians live, but also where there are hundreds of thousands of

Israeli settlers. And today, the Israeli government announced the creation of 22 new settlements

in what the rest of the world regards as occupied territory. In other words, somewhere that Israel is

not, under international law, allowed to settle its population in, and which much, the rest of the world

says, should be a good chunk of the territory for any future Palestinian state, however distant

that prospect might look. The map's been changing for a while, as the number of settlers and

settle months has grown, but today's announcement is being seen as a potential game changer, even in that context.

Elisha Ben-Kimon is a journalist with the Israeli newspaper Yerdiot Akronot

and is one of Israel's best-connected reporters to the Settler movement.

Why is this map a proposed settlement so different to what we've seen up to now?

Let's take, for example, one of these 22 dots, let's take the settlers, Sanu. This is in the north of the Cimmeria, and this kind of settlement that was evacuated in 2005, and now the settlers want to go back over there,

because this destroy all the territorial continuity to the Palestinians between Shchem and Jinnid.

Right, and Shachem, just, I mean, for an international audience, that's what it's called in Hebrew.

Nablis, exactly. Yeah. So between Nabilis, which is sort of central in the West Bank and Janine up in the north.

Yeah. Those two key cities that are very important to the Palestinian state in the future.

And Smodrich set on this maps.

This is Betzel Smotrich, the finance minister, who's also a very important figure in the

settler movement. Yeah. And he wants to destroy the two-state solution. That's why he put in

...