On US President Donald Trump’s inauguration day—January 20, 2025—the Jerusalem District Planning Committee met to discuss the Atarot settlement plan that aims to build 9,000 housing units for Jews where Jerusalem’s now-shuttered Qalandiya airport stands at the northern tip of the city (see Settlements).1

Since then, another four settlement plans have been advanced at various stages across East Jerusalem, suggesting Israel views Trump’s return to the White House as a green light to intensify its expulsion of Palestinians from Jerusalem.2

“For quite a few years, nothing happened with [these plans],” Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at Ir Amim, a Jerusalem-focused Israeli NGO, told Jerusalem Story.3 “And suddenly now they are being advanced together at the same time. So, it’s clear that this is a political decision.”

The Atarot plan came to a halt in 2021 after the Jerusalem District Planning Committee said an environmental survey must be completed before a decision can be made. The Jerusalem Municipality Environmental Quality Department, Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, and the Ministry of Health presented the survey’s findings during the January 20, 2025 meeting—emphasizing the plan shouldn’t be approved due to pollution in the area.4 The settlement is planned on approximately 312 acres of land at the northern tip of East Jerusalem and adjacent to the massive Qalandiya checkpoint. Human rights groups like Ir Amim have expressed that building a settlement in this specific area would cut off East Jerusalem from the city of Ramallah—again fragmenting the West Bank and severing a route used by around 26,000 Palestinians daily.5 Additionally, while most of the area designated for the Atarot settlement is on state land (meaning Palestinian land that the Israeli state seized militarily or bureaucratically), a small section is still privately owned by Palestinians, raising concerns that the Israeli government will seize that land and demolish the homes there.6

Two weeks before Trump took office, the District Planning Committee reopened discussion on a plan to build an 11-story yeshiva (a traditional Jewish seminary) at the entrance of Sheikh Jarrah that had been frozen since 2021.

Two days after Trump’s inauguration, the District Planning Committee discussed Givat Shaked South, a new settlement plan to expand the approved Givat Shaked settlement by roughly five acres—adding 400 housing units for Jews to the settlement totaling a whopping 11,000 settler homes near the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Safafa.7

Then, on February 5, the committee discussed a new plan, jointly submitted by the municipality and settler group Shemini Properties, to increase the number of houses being built in the Nof Zion settlement in the heart of the Palestinian neighborhood Jabal Mukabbir to 380.8

On March 5, the Jerusalem Local Planning and Building Committee held its first hearing on the Nofey Rachel settlement plan, which calls for building 659 housing units next to the Palestinian neighborhood of Umm Tuba. Nofey Rachel, along with the planned Lower Aqueduct settlement, will isolate the neighborhood of Sur Bahir-Umm Tuba from surrounding Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and from the rest of the West Bank, advancing its ghettoization.9

“During Trump’s previous administration, many plans—both settlement plans and settler eviction efforts—that for years, Israel could not advance [because] they were a red line for the then Obama administration,” Tatarsky said. “And then, Trump just said, ‘Okay, you can do what you want.’ And they started moving forward.”

While Ir Amim sees Trump’s second term as the impetus for this recent uptick in Israeli settlement expansion, other settlement experts haven’t been as quick to attribute whoever sits in the Oval Office to settlement development.

Daniel Seidemann, founder of Ir Amim and director of Terrestrial Jerusalem, an Israeli nonprofit monitoring geopolitical developments in Jerusalem, argues that not only were these settlement plans initiated before Trump, the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and the current Israeli government, but that they will continue no matter the political climate.

“Under Biden pre-October 7, the needle moved,” Seidemann told Jerusalem Story.10 “And there is less of a willingness to challenge Israel on things that would’ve been challenged years ago, which means that Israel is proceeding to act with impunity on projects.”

What’s changed, Seidemann says, is Israel isn’t easily intimidated by global and domestic protest.

“What we have witnessed is a waning willingness to engage in the international community, a greater sense of imperial impunity with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, and a total evaporation of any forces of significance in Israel contesting what’s happening,” Seidemann said, adding this has resulted in all avenues of pushback being eradicated.

“That did not happen with the inauguration. That’s been an incremental process over the last several years, which means we have the least engageable government in the history of Israel with a proclivity of advancing the most outrageous things, which nobody will stop,” Seidemann said. “[If] tomorrow Netanyahu and Trump are gone, that’s still going to continue, because that is the dynamic that’s been established.”

Dr. Khalil Toufakji, a Palestinian expert on maps, borders, and settlements, illustrated how this policy change is being implemented on the ground, citing how paused settlement plans from decades ago—like the American Road—are now under construction.

“There is no pressure from Biden and from Trump,” Toufakji told Jerusalem Story.11

In 2024, ownership of land was registered to Israeli settlers or the state in all the aforementioned settlement plans—paving the way for increased settlement expansion.12 The registration was completed before Trump took office.

“Had Kamala Harris been elected, everything that [happened] would’ve happened anyway,” Seidemann said.