Israel Opens Tender for First 1,234 Homes in E1 Settlement as 22 Nations Condemn the Plan

Israel opened bidding this week on the first 1,234 homes of a settlement project that European officials have called a "red line" for more than two decades, and the reaction arrived within days. By Saturday, at least 22 governments had condemned the tender for the E1 settlement area east of Jerusalem: eight Arab and Muslim-majority states in a joint statement, and 14 Western nations plus the European Commission in a separate, growing one. The United Kingdom threatened targeted sanctions and summoned Israel's charge d'affaires. Canada told its own companies to stay away from the deal entirely. The Trump administration, asked directly about it, would not say the word "E1" in its answer.

The area at the center of the dispute is a roughly 12-square-kilometer stretch of West Bank land between East Jerusalem and the existing settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. Filling it with Israeli housing, as the plan calls for, would physically separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, severing the one connection Palestinian negotiators have long said any future state would need to function as a single territory. Israeli officials do not dispute that description of what the plan does. They describe it as the point of building it.

How the Tender Opened This Week

Israel's Housing Ministry issued the tender on Aug. 18, inviting construction bids on 1,234 housing units in E1, according to Al Jazeera and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Bidding closes Oct. 19. The tender is the first concrete step toward building out a plan Israel's Higher Planning Council, the body inside the Civil Administration that governs the occupied West Bank, formally approved in August 2025 for more than 3,400 units across the full E1 area. A year separated that approval from this week's tender, during which the plan existed only on paper.

Ma'ale Adumim Mayor Guy Yifrach announced the marketing of the units personally, calling it "tremendous news for Ma'ale Adumim, and major news for the State of Israel as a whole," according to The Jerusalem Post. He framed the construction as a direct answer to what he described as Palestinian attempts to establish facts on the ground first, saying new building would "thwart" efforts he characterized as illegal encroachment. The Palestine Liberation Organization's Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission condemned the tender the day it opened, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas followed within 48 hours, urging Israel to "immediately halt and cancel" it and calling on the UN Security Council and the European Union to take concrete measures to stop construction rather than issue further statements.

The full E1 buildout would replace 18 Palestinian communities, according to reporting from Jerusalem Story and the UN's human rights office. The most documented of them is Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin community of several hundred people east of Jerusalem whose residents are mostly refugees, originally displaced from what is now Israel decades ago. Smotrich, in his capacity overseeing settlement administration, directed Israel's Civil Administration on May 19 to evict the community "as soon as possible," months before this week's tender opened. The UN human rights office has called that order a case of forcible displacement and demanded it be halted alongside the broader settlement expansion.

Why E1 Has Been Called a Red Line for Two Decades

E1 is not a new idea, and its history runs through nearly every US administration of the past thirty years. Planning for Israeli construction in the corridor dates to 1994 under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and was reaffirmed by Shimon Peres in 1996 as part of proposed territorial arrangements for a permanent peace agreement. Israel's defense minister approved the settlement in 1997, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered construction expedited in 2004. The George W. Bush administration froze it in 2005, telling Israel directly that building in E1 would "contravene American policy," according to reporting compiled by the Institute for Middle East Understanding.

The pattern repeated under President Obama. Netanyahu agreed to a ten-month settlement freeze in 2010 at Obama's request, intended to restart peace talks, and when his government revived E1 planning in 2012, France and the United Kingdom threatened the then-unprecedented step of withdrawing their ambassadors from Israel if the project proceeded. It worked, and the plan went dormant again. Netanyahu pledged to revive E1 in 2020 and renewed the planning process in 2022, but it was the change in the White House in January 2025 that removed the obstacle every prior administration had supplied. Without US pressure holding it back for the first time since Rabin proposed it, the Higher Planning Council approved the full plan seven months later.

The geography explains why the objection has outlasted so many administrations on both sides of the Atlantic. E1 does not simply sit near Jerusalem; it occupies the corridor that Palestinian traffic between the northern West Bank, including Ramallah and Nablus, and the southern governorates of Bethlehem and Hebron already uses to route around Jerusalem's Israeli-controlled core. Settling and connecting the corridor with Israeli-only infrastructure would not just isolate East Jerusalem. It would split the West Bank itself into two separated zones, north and south, with no contiguous Palestinian route between them.

A Coalition From the Gulf to Brussels

The condemnations arrived in two distinct blocs. Foreign ministers from Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia issued a joint statement Friday calling the tender "a dangerous escalation that further advances settlement expansion and annexation," according to the text compiled by the UN's Question of Palestine documentation project. One of the eight signatories, the UAE, normalized relations with Israel under the 2020 Abraham Accords, making its condemnation a notable break from the diplomatic warming that agreement was built on.

The Western bloc built up in two waves. The UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada and Norway issued the first joint statement on Aug. 20, and British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband went furthest of that group, posting that construction in E1 "would cut across the heart of Palestine and risks separating the West Bank from East Jerusalem, which would endanger the viability of a two-state solution," and confirming his office had summoned Israel's charge d'affaires to demand the tender be withdrawn. Miliband said targeted sanctions against individuals involved in the expansion would follow, without specifying names or a timeline. Seven more countries, Greece, Austria, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Belgium, joined the same statement over the following two days, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen added the Commission's own condemnation on Aug. 21, calling the tender "unacceptable," according to reporting carried by The Tribune. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas used comparable language in her own statement, warning the plan would "permanently cut the geographical and territorial contiguity between occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank."

Canada took the additional step of issuing a formal business advisory Friday recommending Canadian companies avoid investment, procurement or tourism tied to West Bank settlements, warning of "significant legal, financial and reputational risks," according to Haaretz. It is a step short of sanctions, but a more concrete signal than most of the statements that preceded it: a government directing its own private sector to change behavior, rather than simply asking another government to.

Israel's Governing Coalition Defends the Plan as Permanent

Israeli officials have not treated the international response as something to manage quietly. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose ministry oversees settlement administration, called the plan the "final nail in the coffin" for the concept of a Palestinian state, according to comments reported by Yahoo News. "Those around the world who try to recognize a Palestinian state will see our response on the ground, not with documents or declarations, but with facts: homes, roads, and Jewish families building their lives here," Smotrich said. "They will talk about a Palestinian dream, and we will continue to build a Jewish reality. This reality buries the idea for good. There is nothing to recognize." He also called on Netanyahu to formally annex the West Bank, a step beyond what even this tender represents.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar responded to the UK specifically, accusing London of a "systematic policy of blaming only Israel" that he said "has already contributed to a massive wave of antisemitic hatred," and argued Jewish residents have as much right to live throughout the West Bank as British citizens have to live anywhere in the UK, according to the JTA report. Neither Smotrich nor Sa'ar disputed the geographic consequence critics describe, that East Jerusalem would be severed from the West Bank. Both framed that outcome as the plan's purpose rather than an unintended side effect requiring a defense.

Netanyahu himself set the tone for this defense months before the tender opened. At a September 2025 signing ceremony for the underlying plan, he told those assembled: "There will be no Palestinian state! This place is ours." National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose own rhetoric on Gaza has separately drawn condemnation from the UN secretary-general this month, aimed his response at Miliband directly, posting on X: "Someone should update Ed that the British Mandate for the Land of Israel ended in 1948 and that Israel is an independent state." Across the governing coalition, from the prime minister down through his most hardline ministers, the public message has been consistent: this is not a policy under negotiation.

The Trump Administration's Calculated Silence

The clearest split in the international response is not between Israel and its critics. It is inside Washington's own position. Asked directly about the E1 tender, a State Department spokesperson did not mention E1 by name, instead repeating a standing line: "As the president has clearly stated, the US does not support Israel annexing the West Bank. A stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration's goal to achieve peace in the region," according to The Times of Israel.

That answer is narrower than it sounds. Opposing formal annexation of the West Bank is not the same as opposing a settlement tender inside it, and the State Department's statement conspicuously avoided saying whether construction in E1 counts as the kind of step that concerns the administration. A US official working on Middle East policy told reporters there is "zero" chance the administration intervenes to stop the plan, according to Newsmax. Every prior US administration since Rabin first proposed E1 in 1994 used American pressure to keep it frozen at some point, including the George W. Bush administration's explicit 2005 objection and the ambassador-withdrawal threats that stopped it in 2012. This administration has, by its own official's account, decided not to use that same influence at all.

The United States was not among the 14 Western governments that signed the growing joint statement, and has not joined any comparable statement issued by its own closest allies this week, the same allies, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Norway, it coordinates with on nearly every other major foreign policy question. Washington's absence from a document its own NATO and Five Eyes partners signed is itself a form of position-taking, whatever the State Department says in response to direct questions.

What the Unit Counts Actually Show

Coverage of this week's tender has not agreed on a single number, and the discrepancy is worth untangling rather than smoothing over. Al Jazeera and JTA both report the tender covers 1,234 units. The Jerusalem Post's own coverage of the same announcement describes it as "the first 1,400 units" being marketed. Total approval figures for the full E1 buildout vary in the same way: 3,412 units in the Jerusalem Post's account, 3,401 in reporting citing the Civil Administration's Higher Planning Council decision directly, and a rounder "more than 3,400" in Al Jazeera's.

None of these gaps is large enough to suggest a real factual dispute about what was approved. They read more like the ordinary friction of separate outlets rounding differently, or citing slightly different stages of the same bureaucratic process. The units formally opened for construction bids and the units publicly marketed to prospective builders may simply be different administrative categories that some outlets collapsed into a single figure without flagging the distinction. What stays consistent across every account is the order of magnitude: somewhere between 1,200 and 1,400 homes are moving to construction bidding right now, out of a total plan exceeding 3,400. That means this week's tender alone covers well over a third of the entire project in a single administrative action. It is not a token first phase; it is the bulk of the plan's first real construction wave, and Xinhua's own count, describing the tender as "about a third of the 3,401 housing units approved," lands closest to a working consensus figure once the rounding across outlets is set aside.

The practical effect of the discrepancy is minor for readers trying to understand what happened, but it is a reminder that even a story this heavily covered, with 22 governments issuing formal statements within a week, still passes through outlets that did not all verify the same underlying government document before publishing a headline number.

An Election Calendar That Complicates the Politics

One detail largely absent from the international coverage: Israel's bidding window on this tender closes Oct. 19, eight days before Israeli elections scheduled for Oct. 27, according to the JTA timeline. The instinctive read is that Netanyahu's coalition timed a settlement expansion to rally its base ahead of a vote. The actual polling complicates that story rather than confirming it. A Maariv survey this summer put Netanyahu's governing bloc at just 48 Knesset seats against a 57-to-61-seat opposition built around Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar party, and Eisenkot led Netanyahu by double digits in head-to-head preference for prime minister, 49% to 38%.

That context reframes what Smotrich's language is doing, but it does not make this a settlements-versus-no-settlements election. Eisenkot himself supports continued settlement expansion in the West Bank and opposes the creation of a Palestinian state, according to reporting from the Institute for Middle East Understanding; his platform argues instead for tighter Israeli security control and physical "separation" from Palestinians, and he has spent recent months touring settlements and warning the territory is drifting toward "chaos" under the current government's management. The E1 tender is not a wedge between a pro-settlement bloc and an anti-settlement one. Nearly every serious contender for prime minister supports settlement growth in some form.

What Netanyahu's coalition has that Eisenkot's does not, at least not yet, is a concrete, irreversible action to point to. A coalition polling behind by double digits has a specific incentive to convert a year-old paper approval into an active construction tender it can describe as permanent and unstoppable, rather than campaign on settlement policy in the abstract the way a challenger still has to. The underlying plan was approved in August 2025, and nothing about the land itself changed this week. What changed is that a coalition facing a difficult election chose this particular ten-week window, bids closing eight days before voters go to the polls, to convert that dormant approval into bidding that has already begun. Whether that reads as a genuine policy priority or as a closing argument aimed at a shrinking base, the geographic consequences, if the homes are actually built, would remain permanent regardless of which government is in office when they are.