The Palestinian Authority and Britain have criticized Israel’s move to advertise a tender for over 1,200 new homes in the occupied West Bank as part of its E1 settlement plan. The scheme would join thousands of settlement units in illegally annexed East Jerusalem to the West Bank’s Maale Adumim bloc, severing East Jerusalem entirely from the West Bank and effectively splitting the territory into two halves. Palestinians have long sought East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

This comes as Palestinian detainees claim that Israeli forces marked some of them with numbers on their foreheads during a raid in the occupied West Bank. One detainee said troops had assigned numbers to some of those held, apparently to keep track of them and manage the questioning.