BICOM

Israel’s Prime Minister has pledged not to remove another West Bank settlement in a speech at a ceremony marking 50 years of Israeli settlements in Samaria last night.

Speaking at the Barkan industrial zone, Benjamin Netanyahu said: “This is the inheritance of our forefathers, this is our country. We came back here to stay forever. There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the Land of Israel… It has been proven that this doesn’t help peace. We uprooted settlements, and we got rockets.”

Netanyahu said he explains to foreign leaders visiting Israel that if Israel were to withdraw, the vacuum could be filled by “extremist forces of Islam,” which “would endanger us, but it would also endanger you, and all of our neighbours; the entire region and in fact the entire Middle East”.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett also attended the event and called for Israeli sovereignty to be applied to Judea and Samaria from now on.

Netanyahu has made similar pledges in the past, including in January 2014 in Davos. However, in Track Two negotiations in London, he reportedly allowed negotiations with the Palestinians to proceed based on the pre-1967 armistice lines, with some land swaps. Netanyahu also suggested that Israeli settlers could remain in their homes as part of a future Palestinian State.