A/HRC/16/72 “is making a mockery of international law”.16 States do customarily require some form of legislative endorsement of international treaty obligations. In this instance, the public validation by Israel of any agreement reached might add to its political legitimacy and the likelihood of future respect and, if it failed to gain sufficient Israeli support, could signal the unsustainability of the agreement. Thus, this new constraint on the finality of a negotiated settlement can at best be viewed as ambivalent, and not itself unlawful, although it might be imprudent, if the objective is to end the conflict through a negotiated agreement, a position that is increasingly confronted by doubts. III. Continuing expansion of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories 14. Given the centrality that has been accorded by both sides to the settlement phenomenon, the Rapporteur believes that more detailed attention to the facts and legal implications of recent settlement expansion seems appropriate. The Israeli 10-month selfdelimited “moratorium” on settlement expansion in the West Bank expired on 26 September 2010, leading to the breakdown of the briefly resumed peace process and giving rise to lengthy negotiations aimed at re-establishing the moratorium that have now been abandoned. However, several points must be noted. First, the 10-month moratorium did not stop settlement construction but only slowed the pace of expansion in some parts of the West Bank;17 it did not purport to freeze settlement construction in occupied East Jerusalem, contending, contrary to the international legal and political consensus, that the whole of Jerusalem, as expanded by Israeli law since 1967, is unoccupied, and that the whole city is the capital of Israel, leaving no part of the city to be available as the capital of a future Palestinian state. In the West Bank, settler construction of public facilities such as schools and community centres as well as thousands of housing units already under construction continued unabated during the moratorium. Second, according to the movement Peace Now, a surge of settlement building took place in the first six weeks following the end of the moratorium on 26 September.18 Further, the settlers managed to start to build 1,629 housing units, and to dig the foundations for 1,116 of them. Work started in 63 settlements, 46 of them east of the separation wall and 17 on the western side of it. In all of 2009, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics data, work on 1,888 new housing units have started. Had the construction continued at the same speed without the moratorium, there would have been 1,574 units during the 10-month period. In the six weeks following the end of the freeze, the settlers managed to start a similar number of units attesting to the reality that the settlement freeze was no more than a 10-month delay in the construction.19 In fact, the rate of settlement construction quadrupled compared to what it had been during the two years before the moratorium.20 Third, and perhaps most importantly, the underlying premises of the moratorium were never drawn into question, namely, that it was a matter of Israeli discretion to initiate or terminate a settlement freeze. Official diplomacy never considered the relevance of the continuing violation arising from the presence of the settlements or the questionable status of the 500,000 Israeli settlers who 16 17 18 19 20 8 “Erekat on referendum: Israel making a mockery of int’l law”, The Jerusalem Post, 23 November 2010. See Peace Now, “Eight Months into the Settlement Freeze”, 2 August 2010. See Peace Now, “In 6 weeks the settlers almost made up for the 10 months Settlement Free,” 13 November 2010. Ibid. See International Middle East Media Center, “Rate Of Israeli Settlement Construction Quadrupled In Last Month”, 21 October 2010.