The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has ordered a halt to the advancement of parliamentary bills linked to the annexation of the West Bank after the US vice-president, JD Vance, described a vote on two bills in the Knesset as an “insult”.
The bills applying Israeli law to the occupied West Bank, which would be tantamount to the annexation of land Palestinians want for a state, won preliminary approval from Israel’s parliament on Wednesday, barely a week after Donald Trump pushed through a deal aimed at ending a two-year Israeli offensive in Gaza.
Asked by reporters about the vote at the end of a two-day visit to Israel, Vance said: “If it was a political stunt, it is a very stupid one, and I personally take some insult to it.
“The West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel. The policy of President Trump is that the West Bank will not be annexed. This will always be our policy.”
On Thursday afternoon Ofir Katz, the chair of Israel’s coalition government, said Netanyahu had instructed him not to advance bills pertaining to annexation, and Netanyahu’s office said that Wednesday’s vote had been a “deliberate political provocation” that aimed to sow division during Vance’s visit.
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, landed in Israel on Thursday, becoming the latest in a string of US officials to visit the country to shore up the Gaza ceasefire. He described any plan to extend Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territory as “potentially threatening for the peace deal”.
“They’re a democracy, they’re going to have their votes, and people are going to take these positions,” Rubio said. “But at this time, it’s something that we … think might be counterproductive.”
Washington has repeatedly said that any annexation of the West Bank would cross a red line. In an interview published on Thursday in Time magazine, Trump said: “It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries … Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”
Israeli media has referred to the nonstop parade of American officials visiting to ensure Israel holds up its side of the fragile ceasefire as “Bibi-sitting”. The term, utilising Netanyahu’s nickname of Bibi, refers to an old campaign ad when Netanyahu positioned himself as the “Bibi-sitter” whom voters could trust with their kids.
The preliminary passage of the bills had embarrassed Netanyahu, who had urged lawmakers to delay their presentation and when failed urged MPs from his Likud party to abstain.
Shouting erupted in the Knesset during the vote. Avi Maoz, a member of the far-right Noam party, declared: “The time has come to apply sovereignty,” insisting Israelis had a duty to “settle in the land of Israel”.
Some in Trump’s administration previously backed Israel’s goal of annexing the West Bank. But the mood has shifted as several Arab and Islamic states – whose support Washington is seeking to help fund and staff a postwar stabilisation force in Gaza – have voiced strong opposition to any annexation. In a joint statement reported on Thursday, more than a dozen Muslim and Arab states condemned the bills as “a blatant violation of international law”.
Issuing what many saw as another thinly veiled threat to Israel’s government, Trump also told Time magazine he was weighing whether to support the release of the imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, the most popular and potentially unifying Palestinian leader, as the US aims to fill a leadership vacuum in postwar Gaza. “I am literally being confronted with that question about 15 minutes before you called,” he said. “That was my question of the day. So I’ll be making a decision.”
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 when it was captured from Jordan in the six-day war. Since then, successive governments have tried to permanently cement Israeli control over the land, in part by declaring swathes of the territory as “state lands”, which prevents private Palestinian ownership.
Since Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023, which triggered Israel’s offensive in Gaza, the country’s far-right government – the most extreme in its history – has accelerated efforts to annex the West Bank, approving dozens of new settlements across the occupied Palestinian territories in an unprecedented expansion.
In August, Israel approved a long-delayed settlement project that would in effect sever the occupied West Bank from East Jerusalem, bisecting the territory and further undermining hopes for a viable Palestinian state.
Construction in the so-called E1 area has been stalled for more than two decades amid international opposition, but a defence ministry committee gave the go-ahead for 3,400 homes. The far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who lives in the West Bank settlement of Kedumim, which is considered illegal under international law, announced the plans in summer, saying the very idea of a Palestinian state was “being erased”.
Alongside political moves toward annexing Palestinian territory, settler violence against Palestinians has sharply intensified since the war in Gaza began.
According to the UN, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the occupied West Bank since 7 October 2023, while thousands more have been forcibly displaced by settler attacks, movement restrictions and home demolitions.
The UN reports that in the first half of 2025 there were 757 settler attacks resulting in casualties or property damage, a 13% rise compared with the same period last year.
On Monday, a 55-year-old Palestinian woman was taken to hospital after being beaten over the head by a masked Israeli settler while she was picking olives. Video footage of the attack shows the man striking her unconscious with a stick before hitting her again as she lay motionless on the ground.
