A view of the E1 area east of Jerusalem, where Israel plans to build around 3,400 settlement homes in a project Britain has condemned as a threat to a future Palestinian state [Getty]
Israel’s issuing of tenders for the E1 settlement project has triggered one of the UK government’s strongest condemnations of Israeli policy yet, but experts told The New Arab that only concrete political and economic measures could stop the plan from going ahead.
On Wednesday evening, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband issued a forceful statement describing the E1 tenders as “unacceptable and destructive” and warning that the settlement would threaten the survival of a two-state solution.
Miliband said he had spoken directly with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, demanding that Israel halt the settlement plans, withdraw the tender and end settlement expansion.
The Israeli chargé d’affaires was also summoned, with the UK demanding the immediate reversal of the tender.
Warning of escalating settler violence and terrorism against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Miliband declared that “Britain will not stand back and accept the destruction of the two-state solution”.
“In the coming weeks we will set out a comprehensive set of measures to respond to Israeli government policies, protect the viability of the Palestinian state, target sanctions at those who participate in illegal settlement expansion, and support a just and lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians.”
The Palestinian Authority also condemned the tenders, while Sa’ar hit back at Miliband’s statement.
The E1 project, long condemned internationally, would see around 3,400 settlement homes built across a 12-square-kilometre area next to occupied East Jerusalem.
Its construction would cut East Jerusalem off from much of the rest of the occupied West Bank and effectively split the territory in two, dealing a potentially fatal blow to the territorial viability of a future Palestinian state.
The project would further erode prospects for a two-state solution, already severely undermined by accelerating Israeli settlement construction across the occupied West Bank since Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition came to power.
Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), described Miliband’s intervention as “one of the most confident and assertive statements we’ve seen coming from the British government on Israeli conduct”.
Doyle told The New Arab that both the language of the statement and the fact that it came directly from the foreign secretary, rather than a junior minister or the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, signalled the seriousness with which London was treating the move.
But he said the real test would be whether Britain was prepared to turn its unusually strong rhetoric into measures capable of changing Israeli policy.
“Will the British government take significant enough measures to persuade this very extremist Israeli coalition to not just stop the E1 settlement project, but to change their approach in its entirety?” Doyle said.
He argued that sanctions should already have been imposed, and that any measures introduced now would amount to Britain catching up with its own stated position on the illegality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and settlement construction.
Human rights groups have repeatedly pressed the government to impose sanctions over Israeli violations in the occupied West Bank, where settler attacks against Palestinians have intensified.
The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians wrote to Middle East Minister Stephen Doughty calling for an immediate trade embargo on settlements in the occupied West Bank.
On Wednesday, a coalition of five groups, including the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, called on the UK government to ban trade with settlements and impose further sanctions on Israel, ahead of a demonstration planned for October marking three years since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The pressure comes amid mounting Palestinian displacement across the occupied West Bank.
Human Rights Watch said on Thursday that 107 Palestinian communities had been fully or partially displaced since January 2023 amid settler attacks, with more Palestinians displaced by settler violence in the first four months of this year than during the whole of 2025.
Amnesty International has described the mass displacement of Palestinians through Israeli settler attacks as state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing.
Against that backdrop, Ameer Dawood, director of Publishing and Documentation at the Colonisation & Wall Resistance Commission, told The New Arab that condemnation alone would do nothing to stop E1 from advancing.
Pointing to Israel’s repeated dismissal of international condemnation, Dawood called for immediate consequences over the tenders.
“The United Kingdom and its partners must move immediately from warnings to concrete consequences: demand the cancellation of the tender, impose sanctions on the ministers, institutions and companies involved, and prohibit all economic activity linked to illegal settlements,” he told The New Arab.
“International law will remain meaningless unless its violation carries an immediate and tangible political and economic cost,” he added.