World News

Britain summons Israel's envoy after bidding opens on 1,200 E1 homes

By Staff Writer  |  21 August 2026

The housing ministry published the tender on 18 August and opened it for bids the same day. Submissions close on 19 October. London has asked for the tender to be withdrawn and has signalled sanctions.

Britain summoned Israel's charge d'affaires on Wednesday and asked for a halt to the E1 housing scheme east of Jerusalem, after Israeli authorities opened bidding on more than 1,200 homes there. The Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, said he had also delivered the message directly to his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar.

The Israeli Government must halt E1 plans immediately, retract the tender and stop all settlement expansion

Ed Miliband, British Foreign Secretary

He called the publication of the tender an unacceptable and destructive act, and said it would endanger the viability of a two state settlement. The British government also said it would set out further measures in the coming weeks, among them sanctions aimed at people involved in settlement expansion.

What the tender actually is

The particulars matter, because this is a live procurement with a date on it. Israel's housing ministry published the tender on 18 August and opened it for bids immediately. Submissions are due by 19 October, which is one week before elections scheduled for 27 October. A monitoring group that tracks the scheme puts the tender at more than 1,200 housing units and says that is about a third of the whole E1 development, which was approved in August last year for around 3,400 homes. The group has said the timing is intended to commit construction before the vote.

E1 is a parcel of roughly 12 square kilometres immediately east of Jerusalem, lying between Jerusalem and the settlement of Maale Adumim.

The objection is about geography, not volume

Twelve hundred homes is not a large scheme by the standards of a capital city. The objection turns on where they would stand. Building on E1 would place a continuous built area between east Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, and it is that separation, rather than the unit count, that has drawn the reaction. When Israel approved the plan last August the United Nations secretary general said it posed an existential threat to a contiguous Palestinian state. Twenty-one countries, Britain and France among them, objected to the approval at the time and asked for it to be reversed.

Excluding east Jerusalem, the West Bank is home to around three million Palestinians and about 500,000 Israeli settlers. Palestinians from the West Bank require permits from the Israeli authorities to pass through checkpoints into east Jerusalem or into Israel.

What a contractor is being asked to price

Anyone weighing a bid before 19 October is pricing more than ground conditions and a programme. The British government has said in terms that it intends to bring forward sanctions directed at people involved in settlement expansion, and has not yet published who or what those measures will reach. That is an open exposure sitting on the far side of a tender deadline, and it is not one that a standard force majeure or change in law clause can be assumed to answer. Twenty-one states took a position on this scheme last year. The tender has now given those positions something concrete to attach to.