The announcement that the settlements would be authorised was made in response to a Supreme Court petition by the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now.

On Tuesday, Israel submitted a formal response to Peace Now’s Supreme Court petition against six illegal outposts. In the response the government declares its intention to legalize four outposts, in isolated areas.

The former government had previously promised to remove the illegal construction built on private land, but had not declared its intention to legalize the outposts, according to Peace Now.

The Supreme Court will hold a hearing on the petition on Wednesday, May 22nd

As for the two remaining outposts on the petition, the Government states that most of the structures that were built on private land were removed, but does not say anything about the future of the outposts themselves.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry which is due to meet the Israeli and Palestinian leaders in attempt to revive peace talks.

“The intention to legalize outposts as new settlements is no less than a slap in the face of Secretary Kerry’s new process and is blatant reassurance to settler interests,” Peace Now said in a statement.

Negotiations between the Israeli and Palestinian have been stalled since 2010, and while Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that he is ready to resume talks at any time, he has refused to meet the Palestinians’ preconditions — notably, a freeze to all settlement construction in West Bank.

At Thursday’s news conference in Ramallah, following talks with President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama said: “”That’s not to say settlements aren’t important, that’s to say if we resolve the main problems, then settlements will be resolved.”

“If the only way to begin the conversation we have to get everything right from the outset … then we’re never going to get to the broader issue, which is how do you structure a state of Palestine,” Obama added.

In response to Obama’s remarks Abbas did not openly call for a settlement freeze as a precondition for negotiations, though he didn’t say the opposite either.

Illegal settlements have been the major obstacle to all negotiations as Israel refused Palestinians’ demands to stop construction of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem despite settlements being illegal under the fourth Geneva convention and being in defiance of UN resolutions.

At the beginning of Obama’s speech in Ramallah, the president said that the United States was “deeply committed” to creating a sovereign state of Palestine.

Obama is on his first visit to the close U.S. ally Israel as president.

After a trip to the West Bank, where he met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas he spoke to Israeli students in Jerusalem. saying that continued settlement activity was “counterproductive” to peace, and that the Palestinians had a right to self-determination, Reuters reported.

But he also insisted that now was the time for the Arab world to start normalizing relations with the Jewish state, according to the news agency.

After he leaves Israel on Friday, Obama is scheduled to visit Jordan

The inquiry which was led by French judge Christine Chanet, states that a multitude of the human rights of the Palestinians are violated in various forms and ways due to the existence of the settlements.

According to the report, these violations are all interrelated forming part of an overall pattern of breaches that are characterized principally by the denial of the right to self-determination and systemic discrimination against the Palestinian people which occur on a daily basis.

Since 1967, Israeli governments have openly led, directly participated in, and had full control of the planning, construction, development, consolidation and encouragement of settlements, the report states.

“In compliance with Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention Israel must cease all settlement activities without preconditions,” said Ms. Christine Chanet, chair of the Mission from France.

The report states that settlements are established and developed for the exclusive benefit of Israeli Jews. The settlements are maintained and advanced through a system of total segregation between the settlers and the rest of the population living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. This system of segregation is supported and facilitated by strict military and law enforcement control to the detriment of the rights of the Palestinian population.

“We are today calling on the government of Israel to ensure full accountability for all violations, put an end to the policy of impunity and to ensure justice for all victims,” said Ms. Asma Jahangir, member of the Mission from Pakistan.

The report also states that Israel is committing serious breaches of its obligations under the right to self-determination and under humanitarian law. The report concludes that the Rome Statute establishes the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction over the transfer of populations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

“The magnitude of violations relating to Israel’s policies of dispossessions, evictions, demolitions and displacements from land shows the widespread nature of these breaches of human rights. The motivation behind violence and intimidation against the Palestinians and their properties is to drive the local populations away from their lands, allowing the settlements to expand,” said Ms. Unity Dow, member of the Mission from Botswana.

Inhabitants of urban and peri-urban areas relied on contaminated water from shallow wells, water providers who charge high unit prices, or standpipes which required mostly women or children to queue for hours. Most households used cesspits or poorly designed septic tanks, risking further groundwater contamination, while the poorest people often had no form of sanitation at all. These deficiencies had serious and direct impacts on people’s health, their ability to engage in economic activities, and children’s school attendance. These problems also harmed the finances of water utilities, which generally attain very low cost recovery from public standpipes.

In 2005, the Government of Morocco and water utility operators in three cities requested a grant from the Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA) to pilot the introduction of performance-based subsidies to encourage service expansion using an innovative output-based aid (OBA) approach.

The outputs for which subsidies were disbursed were simultaneous network connections to water supply and sewerage services for individual households, or in the case of Meknes, connection to either service. The subsidy was operator- and service-specific and paid in local currency in two steps: 60 percent upon certification by an Independent Technical Reviewer (ITR) of a working water and sewerage connection to an eligible household; and 40 percent upon verification by the ITR of at least six months of sustained service.

The OBA approach helped refocus attention on household demand, which led to increased accountability, strengthened partnerships between local authorities and operators, and made monitoring of service delivery a priority.

The pilot provided subsidized access to water supply to 10,504 households and sanitation services to 9,036 households, hence benefitting more than 52,500 people. The programme contributed to improve women and children’s living conditions as they were/are the major water provider/manager in the family.

Households that were simultaneously connected to water supply and sanitation services through the pilot totaled 5,593 in Casablanca and 2,909 in Tangiers. In Meknes, 2,002 households acquired access to water supply services and 534 to sanitation service.

The pilot programme was funded through a US$7 million grant from the GPOBA – a multi-donor trust fund administered by the World Bank. The total project cost was assessed at about US$24 million during preparation.

The built-in incentives of the OBA approach were specifically designed to overcome traditional obstacles to expanding services in informal neighborhoods, namely: inability to afford connection costs; complex technical and administrative obstacles to infrastructure development in poor unzoned areas; and reluctance of national and local governments to fund subsidy programs with no accountability or guarantee of results.

According to the report, the experts told Netanyahu that his plan, announced last week, to build 850 new housing units in West Bank settlements, could trigger a third intifada, if diplomatic deadlock between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority continues.

One expert noted that the burning of a mosque by Jewish extremists constitutes a great risk for the outbreak of violence.

The National Security Council, a body subordinate to the Prime Minister’s Office, initiated the meeting with Netanyahu last Tuesday, which lasted 90 minutes.

Among the academics in attendance were some of Israel’s most acclaimed Mideast experts, including professors Emmanuel Sivan, Shimon Shamir, Eyal Zisser and Meir Litvak and other experts.

The meeting came as controversy in the political arena over the upcoming evacuation of Uplana, a 30-family neighborhood settlement in the West Bank, which the Israeli High Court earlier this year ruled was illegally built on privately-owned Palestinian land, according to Haaretz. 

Israel’s plans to build hundreds of new homes in Jewish West Bank settlements have put Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at odds again with Washington and the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday attacked the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and claimed that the massacres against the Syrian people are made with a support from Hezbollah and Iran for the Syrian regime.

A four-man Ministerial committee formed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, “decided to formalise the status of three communities which were established in the 1990s following the decisions of past governments,” said the statement.

The Government has already declared several times in the past  in court its intention to legalize the outposts. It is the first time since the Shamir Government in 1990 that the Israeli government is has decided the establishment of new settlements.

The three outposts: Bruchin, Rechelim and Sansana  had no Israeli legal status since being established.

Bruchin has around 350 residents and is located in the northern West Bank, along with Rechelim, which is home to around 240 people. Sansana, home to 240 people, is in the southern West Bank, near Hebron, Alarabiya reports.

Hagit Ofran of Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now condemned the government for establishing new settlements in a a devious way.

“The Israeli government is proving its true policy, that instead of going to peace it is building new settlements,” she told AFP on Tuesday.

According to Israel,  settlement outposts built without government approval are illegal, but the international community views all settlements as unlawful, whether approved by the government or not.

Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians have been stalled since  2010 due to disagreement over Jewish settlement building.

Netanyahu says the future of settlements should be decided in peace negotiations.