 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Israel has announced that it will construct 800 new illegal homes for settlers in the occupied West Bank. This decision was announced on January 11th. There are two reasons that seem to be behind this announcement being made now. The first is that US President Donald Trump is set to leave office in just a few days. Under Trump, it became much easier for Israel to expand on the construction of illegal settlements in occupied Palestine. This is because the Trump administration openly supported Israel's building of settlements. In 2019, the then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the US no longer considers building settlements a violation of international law. According to Israeli Rights Group piece now, it is because of this encouragement that Israel constructed a largest number of illegal settler homes in 2020 in recent years. Things may be somewhat different under President-elect Joe Biden. Biden has promised that he will restore the conventional US position on the settlements after taking office. Nabil Abu Rudine, the spokesperson of the President of the Palestinian Authority, said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is racing against time by making such decisions before Trump's departure. The second reason is that elections are coming up soon in Israel. The move is also an attempt by Netanyahu to mobilize support of Israel's right wing before the elections. He has already commissioned several such constructions inside the occupied territories since the announcement of the elections. The election scheduled for March 23 will be the fourth election in less than two years. Netanyahu's re-election prospects look bleak due to divisions within the liquid party. Several rights groups have condemned this announcement of new settlements in occupied West Bank. Even the European Union has urged Israel to halt its settler plans in West Bank. And the European Union calls on Israel to halt these activities and to focus on offering a vision of restarting the talks and rebuilding the trust instead of continuing the settlement expansions and building of settlements which are illegal under international law. This is despite the fact that most EU countries do not even recognize Palestine. According to the international laws and UN resolutions, all Israeli settlements inside occupied Palestinian territories are illegal. Today around 500,000 illegal settlers live in the West Bank alone. Even an Israeli human rights group has called these settlements a part of Israel's apartheid regime. On January 12, the rights group Betzelam released a report calling Israel an apartheid state. Betzelam is Israel's oldest and one of the most prominent human rights group. According to the group, the settlements are part of Israeli policy of advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group, Jews, over another group, Palestinians. The group said that Israel's land policy was designed to judise the entire region from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And this process intensified after the war and occupation in 1967 when Israel began to build illegal Jewish settlements inside occupied territories. The executive director of Betzelam, Hagai Al-Arth, stated that this sobering look at reality need not lead to despair but quite the opposite. It is a call for change.