On Wednesday, December 18, 2024, the Higher Planning Council is set to discuss the promotion of 286 housing units in two settlements in the West Bank. The discussion on 18/12/24 will take place about a week after a meeting held to advance 227 units and two weeks after the discussion on advancing 274 units. In the monthly summary, the Planning Council would discuss advancing a total of 787 housing units across the West Bank.
Plan Details:
| Plan Number | Status | Settlement | Housing Units |
| 1/ 6/ 237 | Deposit | Eli | 118 |
| 4/ 10/ 119 | Deposit | Nofim | 168 |
| Total | 286 |
Context:
In July, the Higher Planning Council approved 5,255 housing units in West Bank settlements. Since the beginning of 2024, the Israeli government has advanced plans for a total of 8,720 housing units. Together with the plans to be discussed in December, the total number for 2024 will amount to 9,507.
One of the changes made by the Netanyahu-Smotrich government on June 2023, was the cancellation of need for a ministerial approval for the promotion of plans in the settlements. Until this decision the Minister of Defense had to approve in advance the discussion of every plan in the Higher Planning Council. In recent years, his instructions were that the HPC would convene to promote plans in settlements only 4 times in a year and in every meeting they approved thousands of units. In recent weeks we start to see a change according to which, the HPC convenes every other week to promote a few plans with few hundreds units. This makes each approval of plans less “dramatic” in terms of number of housing units. This way, the government hopes to normalize it and attract less international criticism.