JERUSALEM: Jewish residents of an explosive settlement in the West Bank city of Hebron said Thursday they had begun work in the construction of a new neighborhood.
“We are clearing the area for the beginning of the new project,” said Yishai Fleisher, spokesman for Hebron’s Jewish community.
Israel approved the construction four years ago on an Israeli military base and allocated more than $6 million to it.
The Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now is suing to stop the project, which it says is the first major expansion of the Jewish community in Hebron in two decades.
The neighborhood would eventually contain 31 homes, Fleisher said.
About 1,000 Jewish settlers live in Hebron under heavy Israeli military protection among more than 200,000 Palestinians.
Israel occupied the West Bank, including Hebron, along with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem in 1967. Palestinians eye the areas for their future state.
Hebron contains a holy site known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi mosque and to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs, which is revered by both faiths.
Palestinian Hebron resident Issa Amro, an activist against settlements, said the new neighborhood would exacerbate friction in the area.
“It means an increase in violence. It means the restrictions on us as Palestinians. It means changing the identity of our own city to an Israeli, Hebrew city,” he said.
The construction was revealed by Peace Now, which published video showing a digger at work.
The Israeli military body responsible for civilian affairs in the West Bank, COGAT, approved the new settler units in central Hebron in 2017.
Peace Now and the Hebron municipality challenged the apartment project in Jerusalem’s district court and lost, said Hagit Ofran of Peace Now.
The area had previously served as a bus station before the Israeli army closed it for security reasons, Ofran said.
“Now Israel decided there was no military purpose anymore, there is no security need, so it should return to the (Palestinians),” Ofran said. “But instead of returning it, they are taking it and giving it to settlers.”
Fleisher said no court issued an injunction against construction.
Ofran said her group and Hebron are now appealing to Israel’s supreme court.
Israelis in West Bank flashpoint dig for new neighborhood
https://arab.news/vj7sf
Israelis in West Bank flashpoint dig for new neighborhood
- "We are clearing the area for the beginning of the new project," said Yishai Fleisher, spokesman for Hebron's Jewish community
- The Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now is suing to stop the project
Battered by Gaza war, Israel’s tech sector in recovery mode
- “High-tech companies had to overcome massive staffing cuts, because 15 to 20 percent of employees, and sometimes more, were called up” to the front as reservists, IIA director Dror Bin told
JERUSALEM: Israel’s vital tech sector, dragged down by the war in Gaza, is showing early signs of recovery, buoyed by a surge in defense innovation and fresh investment momentum.
Cutting-edge technologies represent 17 percent of the country’s GDP, 11.5 percent of jobs and 57 percent of exports, according to the latest available data from the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA), published in September 2025.
But like the rest of the economy, the sector was not spared the knock-on effects of the war, which began in October 2023 and led to staffing shortages and skittishness from would-be backers.
Now, with a ceasefire largely holding in Gaza since October, Israel’s appeal is gradually returning, as illustrated in mid-December, when US chip giant Nvidia announced it would create a massive research and development center in the north that could host up to 10,000 employees.
“Investors are coming to Israel nonstop,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the time.
After the war, the recovery can’t come soon enough.
“High-tech companies had to overcome massive staffing cuts, because 15 to 20 percent of employees, and sometimes more, were called up” to the front as reservists, IIA director Dror Bin told AFP.
To make matters worse, in late 2023 and 2024, “air traffic, a crucial element of this globalized sector, was suspended, and foreign investors froze everything while waiting to see what would happen,” he added.
The war also sparked a brain drain in Israel.
Between October 2023 and July 2024, about 8,300 employees in advanced technologies left the country for a year or more, according to an IIA report published in April 2025.
The figure represents around 2.1 percent of the sector’s workforce.
The report did not specify how many employees left Israel to work for foreign companies versus Israeli firms based abroad, or how many have since returned to Israel.
- Rise in defense startups -
In 2023, the tech sector far outpaced GDP growth, increasing by 13.7 percent compared to 1.8 percent for GDP.
But the sector’s output stagnated in 2024 and 2025, according to IIA figures.
Industry professionals now believe the industry is turning a corner.
Israeli high-tech companies raised $15.6 billion in private funding in 2025, up from $12.2 billion in 2024, according to preliminary figures published in December by Startup Nation Central (SNC), a non-profit organization that promotes Israeli innovation.
Deep tech — innovation based on major scientific or engineering advances such as artificial intelligence, biotech and quantum computing — returned in 2025 to its pre-2021 levels, according to the IIA.
The year 2021 is considered a historic peak for Israeli tech.
The past two years have also seen a surge in Israeli defense technologies, with the military engaged on several fronts from Lebanon and Syria to Iran, Yemen, Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Between July 2024 and April 2025, the number of startups in the defense sector nearly doubled, from 160 to 312, according to SNC.
Of the more than 300 emerging companies collaborating with the research and development department of Israel’s defense ministry, “over 130 joined our operations during the war,” Director General Amir Baram said in December.
Until then, the ministry had primarily sourced from Israel’s large defense firms, said Menahem Landau, head of Caveret Ventures, a defense tech investment company.
But he said the war pushed the ministry “to accept products that were not necessarily fully finished and tested, coming from startups.”
“Defense-related technologies have replaced cybersecurity as the most in-demand high-tech sector,” the reserve lieutenant colonel explained.
“Not only in Israel but worldwide, due to the war between Russia and Ukraine and tensions with China.”
