UN calls on Israel to reverse new settlement plans

Newshour

BBC

Daily News, News

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

There's been fierce international criticism of Israeli plans to build more than three-thousand homes in a controversial settlement in the occupied West Bank. The country's far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said the move - which will split the territory - will "bury the idea of a Palestinian state". Britain's foreign secretary, David Lammy, described the plan as a "flagrant breach of international law" that "must be stopped".

Also in the programme: Humanitarian workers in Sudan say they lack the resources to deal with a deadly cholera outbreak in camps for people displaced by the civil war; what sort of welcome are Alaskans preparing for President Putin; and why are some female Australian birds developing male sex organs.

(Photo: Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich speaks at a press conference regarding settlements expansion for the long-frozen E1 settlement, that would split East Jerusalem from the occupied West Bank, near the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, August 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello there and welcome to News Out from the BBC World Service coming to you live from London with me, Sean Lay.
0:10.4	The United Nations has urged Israel to reverse today's announcement by the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich of a project to construct a new Jewish settlement which would divide the occupied West Bank
0:22.0	from East Jerusalem. Mr Smotrich, who leads a small party on the right, but one which is
0:27.1	critical to the survival of Prime Minister Benymin Netanyahu's coalition government, said one
0:32.4	result of building on the land would be to bury the prospects for a Palestinian state.
0:37.3	On that, if nothing else, the UN agrees with him.
0:39.9	It would put an end to prospects of a two-state solution, its spokesman said.
0:44.6	Earlier, Mr Smotrich announced that construction would go ahead
0:47.5	with the news conference in sweltering heat in Mal'Ale-Adumim,
0:51.7	an existing settlement next to the land which it's proposed to build on.
0:58.1	Anyone who is trying to recognise a Palestinian state today will receive our answer on the ground.
1:05.1	Not with documents, nor with decisions or statements, but with facts.
1:10.1	Facts of houses, facts of neighbourhoods, roads and of more and more
1:14.5	Jewish families building lives. They will speak of the false Palestinian dream. We will continue to build
1:22.1	a fulfilling Jewish reality. This reality definitively buries the idea of a Palestinian state simply because there
1:30.1	is nothing to recognise and no one to recognise. Five hands, Mr Bezalel Smotrich, while our
1:36.1	correspondent John Donelson was at his news conference. This E1 plan has been controversial for decades, effectively to settle all the area between Jerusalem there, up on the hill, with the big Jewish settlement there of Mara Adameem.
1:54.2	Now, Palestinians have long said that if that were to happen, it would effectively cut the West Bank, the occupied West Bank in two
2:02.5	and make achieving a Palestinian state effectively impossible.
2:07.8	Now, the difference we've got here today is in the past, it's been the Palestinians who said that.
2:13.5	Today, we've basically got the finance minister, Bezal-Smotrich, saying, look, that's his intention.
2:20.8	That is the whole point a Palestinian state is never going to happen.
	...

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