Israel 'approves hundreds of new homes'

Israel has given final building approval for 352 homes in settlements in the occupied West Bank, an anti-settlement movement said yesterday - construction that Palestinians see as jeopardising their prospects for statehood.

The Peace Now group said a meeting on Wednesday by a planning committee of Israel's military-run Civil Administration for the West Bank also moved plans for 770 other settler homes to more advanced stages.

Settlements are one of the most heated issues in efforts to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, frozen since 2014.

"I think what Israel is doing is a purposeful, well-planned process of destruction of the two-state solution and possibility of the establishment of a Palestinian state," Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian lawmaker, said of the committee's decision.

Palestinians want the West Bank for a future state, along with East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Most countries consider as illegal the settlements that Israel built in the territory it captured in the 1967 Middle East war.