JERUSALEM, Jan 3: Prominent members of Israel's ruling Likud party have proposed the annexation of part of the West Bank as the battle for rightwing votes intensifies before the general election in less than three weeks.

Government minister Yuli Edelstein told a conference in Jerusalem that the lack of Israeli sovereignty over Area C — the 60 per cent of the West Bank under full Israeli military control in which all settlements are situated — “strengthens the international community's demand for a withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines”.

Ze’ev Elkin, the chairman of the governing coalition, said Israel should adopt a “salami” approach to annexation. “We will try to apply sovereignty over as much as we can at any given moment,” he said.

A third Likud member, extreme rightwing settler Moshe Feiglin, proposed that the state of Israel should pay Palestinian families to leave the West Bank, using funds earmarked for security measures. “We can give every family in Judea and Samaria [the biblical term for the West Bank] $500,000 to encourage to emigrate ... This is the perfect solution for us,” he said.

The comments, delivered at a conference organised by a radical settlers’ organisation, “removed the masks” of the Likud-Beiteinu electoral alliance, said Tzipi Livni, former foreign minister and leader of a new centrist party, Hatnua. “Likud-Beiteinu is extreme rightwing, and will lead to the destruction of Zionism and the establishment of a binational state,” she said. The rightwing “will make Israel into a boycotted, isolated and ostracised state”.

The Likud-Beiteinu alliance — led by the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and Avigdor Lieberman, who recently resigned as foreign minister ahead of a trial on fraud and breach of trust charges — is facing an unexpectedly strong challenge from Jewish Home, a party even further to the right and led by Netanyahu's former chief of staff, Naftali Bennett.

By arrangement with the Guardian