Tuesday 17 / February / 2026
Ankara: A coalition of eight nations, including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, has issued a forceful condemnation of the Israeli occupation's decision to designate vast tracts of land in the occupied West Bank as "state lands," according to a joint statement released on Tuesday by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The collective statement, endorsed by the Foreign Ministers of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, denounced in the strongest terms the occupation's declaration classifying occupied West Bank territories as "state lands" and its approval to initiate large-scale land registration and property ownership settlement procedures—the first such action since 1967.
The ministerial declaration affirmed that this unlawful measure constitutes a grave escalation designed to accelerate illegal settlement expansion, facilitate land confiscation, entrench Israeli occupation control, and impose illegitimate sovereignty over occupied Palestinian territory, thereby systematically undermining the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.
The ministers reiterated their categorical rejection of all unilateral actions aimed at altering the legal, demographic, and historical character of the occupied Palestinian territory, emphasising that such policies represent a perilous escalation certain to inflame tensions and destabilise not only the occupied Palestinian territory but the entire region.
