Israel’s finance minister on Monday welcomed President-elect Donald Trump’s victory and said it meant “the time has come” to exert full Israeli sovereignty over parts of the occupied West Bank.

The speech by Bezalel Smotrich, one of the most powerful ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government, was the strongest indication to date of how Trump’s election has emboldened Israeli hard-liners as they seek to cement the state’s control over the Palestinian territories.

“Trump’s victory brings an important opportunity for the State of Israel,” Smotrich told supporters at a conference of his religious Zionist party, according to comments shared by his spokesman. During Trump’s first term, he said, “we were on the verge of applying sovereignty over the settlements” in the West Bank. “Now,” he said, “the time has come to make it a reality.”

Netanyahu’s government in the past two years has dramatically expanded Israel’s footprint in the occupied West Bank, where an estimated 3 million Palestinians live alongside more than 500,000 settlers.

His administration has approved strategic land seizures and major settlement construction, escalated demolition of Palestinian property and increased state support for Jewish settler outposts built in violation of Israeli and international law.

Settler violence against Palestinian residents has grown commonplace, often in full view of Israeli soldiers and police officers.

Smotrich, head of the National Religious Party-Religious Zionism, frequently issues inflammatory statements. He has advocated, for instance, for the starvation of 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, and for Israelis to occupy the land there.

His remarks Monday underscored Israel’s deepening occupation in the West Bank, where the army in May transferred significant management powers to a Smotrich ally Hillel Roth.

Giving military control to a handpicked civilian has been viewed as another step toward Smotrich’s long-running aspiration, outlined in a 2017 treatise, to achieve “victory by settlement” and extend Israeli law over the territory — an effort analysts say would effectively convert occupation into annexation.

“Moving forward, I intend to lead a government decision stating that the Israeli government will work with President Trump’s new administration and the international community to apply sovereignty and seek American recognition,” Smotrich said.

The U.N.’s highest court this year ordered Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territory, evacuate existing settlements and pay reparations to Palestinians who have lost land and property. The Israeli government declined to participate in the proceedings, which Netanyahu described as an “abuse of international law and the judicial process,” and rejected the “false decision” they produced.

The Israeli government has also ignored the Biden administration’s insistence that any diplomatic solution to the war in Gaza include a path to an independent Palestinian state. Full annexation of the West Bank, rights groups say, would sound the death knell to that lingering ambition, rights groups say.

In his comments Monday, Smotrich explicitly linked Trump’s election to his proposed path forward.

“After years in which, unfortunately, the current administration chose to interfere in Israeli democracy and personally refused to cooperate with me as Israel’s finance minister, Trump’s victory also brings an important opportunity,” Smotrich said. He declared 2025 “the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” the biblical name for the West Bank.

The Biden administration has been a strong supporter of Israel, supplying the government with billions of dollars in American weaponry to fight wars in Gaza and Lebanon, despite concerns over the tens of thousands of civilians the weapons have helped kill.

Smotrich boasted in June about the steps he’d taken to achieve his vision for the West Bank. He vowed to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state through “structural changes” in Israel’s management of the territory “that will change the DNA of the system for many, many years,” according to the Israeli rights group Peace Now, which obtained a recording of the conference.

“He is using the election to say that we are headed toward annexation, but this is not a new idea,” said Yonatan Mizrahi, head of the settlements monitoring unit at Peace Now. “How real it is depends on one person, and that’s Donald Trump. He didn’t give the greenlight under the previous administration. The question is whether he will now.”

An earlier “peace plan” outlined by Trump in 2020 would have required Israel to freeze settlement construction in the West Bank for four years. But it would not have disturbed any existing settlements.

It was unclear whether Smotrich’s comments Monday indicated new action by the Netanyahu administration. Smotrich said he had instructed the Defense Ministry’s settlement administration division and Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank to prepare the groundwork to extend Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank, but did not say whether this was a new development. His spokesman did not respond to requests for clarification.

Some analysts saw little new in the remarks.

“I’m not sure I’d call it an announcement — just the usual performative statements in a faction meeting of his party intended for press coverage,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a Tel Aviv-based fellow at Century International. “I view this as his two cents’ worth on Trump’s victory, hoping to instill the notion that Trump should go back to the support for piecemeal but formal annexation he gave in the first term.”

But Naomi Kahn, director of the international division at the pro-settler lobbying group Regavim, said she hoped the announcement signaled the beginning of an effort for which the group has long advocated: extending Israeli sovereignty — and with it, civil law — across the West Bank, beginning with the sections that make up Area C, home to most of the settlers.

Israel already exercises full administrative and security control over Area C, which comprises about 60 percent of the West Bank. But activities such as the construction of roads and houses, the transfer of property and the provision of basic services such as water and electricity are governed by Israeli authorities using a patchwork of military regulations and Ottoman and Jordanian laws — not the rules that apply to Israelis who live within the country’s internationally recognized 1948 borders.

Regavim, which was co-founded by Smotrich in 2006, has long pushed for Israel to annex the West Bank entirely.

Kahn hoped Smotrich’s speech “means that the state of Israel has to take responsibility for Area C — really take responsibility,” including by “planning for the entire area, creating a master plan for development.”

The measures the Israeli government ultimately takes, and when it takes them, she said, are a matter of political will. Trump’s election, she said, presented “an opportunity for fresh eyes to look at this situation.”

Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer and fellow with the Washington-based Democracy for the Arab World Now, said the de facto annexation of the West Bank would be “not just one more violation of international law” but “a pivotal violation that challenges the whole idea of how the international legal order was formed.”

“There’s a fundamental prohibition that if we ignore, it would lead to more wars because there will be more incentives toward occupation.”

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Loveluck reported from London, Parker from Cairo and Brown from Washington. Miriam Berger in Jaffa, Israel, contributed to this report.