The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs says Israel’s claim to 800 hectares of land in the Jordan Valley is a “crime” that is part of an “official policy racing against time to annex the West Bank and eliminate the possibility of creating a Palestinian state”.

“There are no morals, values, principles or international resolutions that can stop the extremist right,” the ministry said in a statement according to Al Jazeera.

It added that the plan by Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to develop hundreds of housing units near the Israeli settlement of Yafit was once again an indication that Israel “denies the existence of our people and incites their extermination and displacement”.

“Israel’s continued impunity provides the fascists with the necessary time to complete the slaughter and extermination of our people, the theft of their homeland and their displacement from it,” it said, adding that international complicity with Israel’s crimes was “the crime of the century”.