Israeli ministers on Sunday officially reopened Sa-Nur, a settlement in the occupied West Bank that was evacuated 20 years ago, marking the occasion with defiant declarations against Palestinian statehood and calls to resettle Gaza.
Several cabinet members and lawmakers attended the ceremony near a cluster of white prefabricated homes arranged in rows on a hilltop.
Excluding east Jerusalem, more than 500,000 Israelis now live in the West Bank in settlements that are illegal under international law, among some three million Palestinians.
"On this exciting day, we celebrate a historic correction to the criminal expulsion from Northern Samaria," Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, using the Israeli biblical term for part of the West Bank.
Sa-Nur's settlers were evicted in 2005 as part of Israel's so-called disengagement policy that also saw the country withdraw troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip.
The policy promoted by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon was framed as a security measure intended to reduce Israel's civilian and military footprint in densely populated Palestinian areas.
Israel's current government, considered one of the most right-wing in the country's history, approved the reconstruction of all four northern West Bank settlements evacuated in 2005.
Authorities have approved 126 housing units in Sa-Nur alone.
"We are cancelling the shame of the disengagement, burying the idea of a Palestinian state and returning to the settlement of Sa-Nur," Smotrich said.
Smotrich, a far-right minister in the ruling coalition and a settler himself, also called for the resettlement of the Gaza Strip as a "security belt" for the State of Israel.
Israeli media reported that 16 families had moved into the re-established settlement in recent days, adding that the new residents included Yossi Dagan, head of the northern West Bank Settlements Council.
Dagan was among those evacuated from Sa-Nur in 2005.
"For me, this is both a national and a personal closing of a circle," Dagan said after cutting the ribbon at the ceremony.
"No more uprootings, no more retreats. We have returned to stay."
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and since then settlement expansion has been a policy under successive Israeli governments.
But it has accelerated significantly under the current coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
More than 100 settlements have been approved since the government came to power in 2022, according to activists and authorities.
