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WASHINGTON: Since it came to power in December, the latest Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accelerated its efforts, practical and legal, to annex the occupied West Bank, despite protests from the Palestinians and the international community, according to experts.

Speaking during a panel discussion at the Middle East Institute in Washington on Wednesday, they said the current government has transferred control of the West Bank from the defense ministry, or military control, to civilian authorities. This has effectively changed the nature of the Israeli occupation from a de facto situation to one that is considered de jure, or legally recognized, they added.

Many Israeli leaders contend that the military occupation is really more of a “territorial dispute,” in an attempt to obfuscate discussions about Israeli government policies and actions in the Occupied Territories, the experts noted.

Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer and human rights activist, said the term “disputed territory” that Israeli politicians and their defenders often invoke is a political phrase that fails to accurately describe the situation on the ground.

The term “occupation,” which reflects the reality, is a legal term defined under international law that accurately conveys certain concepts, rights and status for occupied territories and their residents, he added.

Almost all international legal scholars and institutions, including the Israeli Supreme Court, describe the Palestinian territories that Israel took control of in 1967 as “occupied territories.”

Sfard said: “Each and every housing unit in a settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal under international law; not just any international law but the most fundamental one.”

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former senior US State Department official, said that Washington has contributed to the ongoing Israeli occupation as a result of its reluctance to apply its own formal policies to the conflict.

Successive US administrations have “catered to Israeli needs and requirements” and focused on direct negotiations and principles rather than dealing with the realities on the ground, he added. This direct-negotiation approach ultimately favors the Israeli side given the asymmetrical balance of power between the two sides, Miller said.

Wesam Ahmad of the Al-Haq Center for Applied International Law, an independent Palestinian nongovernmental human rights organization based in Ramallah in the West Bank, described the Israeli occupation as an “ongoing settler, colonialist project,” and said that the reality for Palestinians is “ongoing colonialism” that started as a “Zionist project.” They are deprived of access to their land as settlers take more of it and target them with violence, he added.

“This is serving to perpetuate the illegal settlement-building” in the Occupied Territories, Ahmad said. He added that Israel has come up with an “innovative approach” to annexing occupied land while relegating Palestinians to a lesser status, with limited autonomy.

Dahlia Scheindlin, a Tel Aviv-based policy fellow at the Century Foundation and an expert on public opinion, said the recent shift in control of the Occupied Territories was only partly administrative.

It would not have happened, she said, without amendment of the basic laws of Israeli government, something similar to a constitutional amendment, but most Israeli citizens choose to not to pay attention to such changes because many do not relate to the Palestinian situation.

Scheindlin said the changes mean the illegal occupation is now “baked into Israel’s basic laws and its constitutional-level laws,” but noted that many Jewish Israeli citizens choose not to see it that way, for many reasons.

She described right-wing Israeli politician Bezalel Smotrich, who is in charge of the government’s occupation policies and is minister of finance, as the “minister of annexation.”

Most Israelis do not consider the occupation or relations with Palestinians as a priority or as having any great connection to their daily lives, she added.