Israeli Press
Peace Now documents Israel annexing Areas A and B without legislation
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The Israeli organisation Peace Now published a report on Tuesday arguing that the government has taken apart the territorial architecture of the Oslo accords without ever putting a word of it to the Knesset.
Ynet, which carried the findings, summarised the method in a sentence: settlement through military seizure orders, and the transfer of civil powers to the Civil Administration, applied inside the areas Oslo assigned to Palestinian control.
The report's central fact is a set of signatures. In July, according to Peace Now, the head of Israel's Central Command, Avihai Blot, signed fifteen military seizure orders for land inside Area A — the zone under full Palestinian civil and security jurisdiction under the 1995 agreement.
The land is to carry a transport corridor between two new settlements, Emek Dotan near Arraba and Noa near Qabatiya. Peace Now says this is the first time since Oslo that seizure orders in Area A have been used for an openly civilian settlement purpose rather than a temporary security one.
The powers that moved#
A second track runs through the cabinet. In February the political-security cabinet authorised the Civil Administration to enforce environmental, water and archaeological regulation inside Areas A and B.
Peace Now's warning about that decision is about breadth. Those three headings are drawn widely enough to reach, in the report's reading, almost any Palestinian structure or business in the areas the accords placed outside Israeli civil jurisdiction.
In June the Civil Administration's supreme planning council took planning and construction powers over settlement and religious sites away from the Hebron municipality and kept them.
The money and the ground#
The report puts the clearance revenues in the same frame. Israel collects import duties and fuel and cigarette taxes for the Palestinian Authority under the Paris Protocol — historically more than 60 percent of the PA budget, around 11 billion shekels a year.
Only half were transferred over the current government's term through 2025, Peace Now found, and nothing at all has moved since June 2025.
On the ground the report counts at least twenty-three outposts established in Area B over two and a half years, seven of them raised at once in late 2024 — another first since the accords were signed. It records dozens of Palestinian homes left after settler attacks, some of them afterwards occupied by settlers.
The occupation of a house does not need a law. It needs a signature, a seizure order and a road.
Smotrich answers#
The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, did not dispute the findings. He treated them as a record of achievement.
"The report is a document of Israeli government achievements," he said. "What they call eroding Oslo, we call correcting thirty years of neglect. I am proud of the settlement revolution I led to prevent a Palestinian terror state. This is just the beginning."
That answer is the reason the report matters beyond its arithmetic. The annexation debate in Israel has been conducted for two years as a question of when the Knesset will vote. Peace Now's case is that the vote has been made unnecessary by administrative practice, and the minister responsible for that practice agrees.
For a Palestinian reader the consequence sits in the ordinary places. A seizure order in Area A reaches farmland that the Palestinian Authority is nominally responsible for. An archaeology file opened by the Civil Administration reaches a house.
The paper's own reporting has tracked the pieces separately — the settlement budget and the thirty-four outposts, the demolition figures in Area C, the displacement ledger. What the Peace Now report supplies is the join between them, and the name its authors give the result.
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