Omar Ashour, a professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, says that the Israeli announcement of building 3,500 settlement units in the occupied West Bank only seeks to increase violence against Palestinians. “We know that October 7 happened partly because of settlement activities, escalations in Jerusalem, and the unresolved history of this conflict,” he told Al Jazeera. “This is basically taking us into a similar round of escalation. It means that a peaceful resolution for this conflict is just getting further and further away,” he added.
