Israel’s illegal settlements are Europe’s credibility test The EU has documented accelerating annexation. It must now use its collective power to confront it. Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory have become the clearest test of European credibility, at both EU and member-state levels, and of any serious commitment to end the conflict in Palestine and reach a lasting solution.

Human rights violations by the occupying power have continued since the 1948 Nakba and, over the past three years, have taken the form of a genocidal war and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The question for EU policymakers is whether they are serious about defending the two-state solution they repeatedly endorse, which requires an end to the occupation in its entirety and all its practices. That test has gained new urgency since the European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s de facto foreign ministry, published its annual report for 2025 on July 17, 2026.

The document provides detailed evidence that settlement construction is part of a central, integrated Israeli political project, not merely a matter of demographic expansion. The project combines settlement building, legalisation of outposts, land confiscation, settler violence and changes to governance and administrative systems, creating what the report describes as an accelerated path towards de facto annexation and the further erosion of prospects for a viable Palestinian state. By the EU’s own standards, such a description should lead its authors to recommend deterrent measures against this unlawful project.

The report details Israeli measures that, by any fair reading, amount to blatant aggression against Palestinian rights. It notes that, in 2025 alone, the Israeli government approved 54 new official settlements in the occupied West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, an unprecedented number in a single year, and established 86 new settlement outposts, including 58 agricultural and pastoral outposts. It further records plans for 63,311 settlement housing units, of which 27,941 are in the West Bank and 35,370 are covered by 56 plans in East Jerusalem, more than double the previous record set in 2023 and a huge leap from 2018, when just 11,513 units were advanced.

According to the EEAS, the logical outcome of this project is the fragmentation of the West Bank, the severing of its northern and southern parts and the isolation of East Jerusalem from the rest of the Palestinian territory. Palestinian communities would be confined to separate, encircled and besieged enclaves, making the establishment of a Palestinian state highly improbable. Yet this prospective state is central to the EU’s official framework for resolving the conflict.

Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, few phrases have been repeated more often by European politicians than “the two-state solution as the basis for ending the conflict”. The report reinforces the Palestinian narrative that the conflict did not begin in October 2023. The genocidal war and large-scale destruction in Gaza have understandably dominated international attention for nearly three years.

But the EEAS document also exposes the extent of Israeli violations in the occupied West Bank, where armed resistance is not comparable in scale to that in Gaza.