WEST BANK (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has taken new measures to ensure the acceleration of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. 
Smotrich has been seeking to expand land seizures throughout occupied Palestinian territory - outlawed under international law - via a new mechanism that will allow for weekly settlement building permits, which previously took months to be approved.
According to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth (Ynet), these measures have been taken despite U.S.-Israeli tensions over illegal settlements and violent settler activity, as well as guidelines set by the United States that allow Israel to build a few settlements only near the designated “Green Line”.
This 1949 armistice line is an area that separates the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Al-Quds and the Gaza Strip from the other parts of Israeli-occupied territories.
Ynet reported that Smotrich’s Settlement Administration, which is responsible for land seizures in the West Bank, aims at normalizing settlement planning by holding meetings on a weekly basis, where discussions would lead to the approval of new settlements. 
In the past, land grabs took months to be approved, and meetings discussing such decisions where held once every three months. 
The weekly committee meetings are expected to significantly raise the amount of land seizures in 2025 compared to previous years.
In another development, angry members of some of the families of Israeli captives still held in Gaza harangued Smotrich on Monday over his opposition to a deal being negotiated in Qatar to halt the fighting and bring their relatives home.
Smotrich described the deal taking shape as “a catastrophe” for the Zionist regime’s security and said the occupying regime should keep up its campaign in Gaza until the complete surrender of Hamas, the resistance movement that ran the enclave before the war.
Dozens of members of the captives’ families, many carrying photographs of the missing, squeezed into a committee room in the Israeli parliament where a meeting of the finance committee was held to examine the 2025 budget.
Some furious, some crying and pleading, they attacked Smotrich in an emotionally charged encounter that lasted for more than an hour, accusing him of abandoning the 98 Israeli and foreign captives still left in Gaza.
“These people can be returned,” Ofir Angrest, whose brother Matan was taken captive during the Hamas-led operation on Israeli-occupied territories on Oct. 7, 2023.
“The conditions are ripe, it’s time for a deal, the prime minister said it. How can you, the minister of finance, oppose the return of all these abductees?“
Smotrich, leader of one of the hard-line parties in prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, has been among the loudest opponents of a deal which he described as a “surrender” to Hamas.
Qatar, which is brokering the talks alongside Egypt and the United States, said it had given a draft agreement to both the Zionist regime and Hamas following a “breakthrough” overnight.