Israel is moving to start construction on a vast illegal settlement in the heart of the West Bank, designed to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.

The Israel Land Authority in mid-December quietly posted a tender for construction of 3,401 homes in the “E1” project, which will effectively sever the north and south of the occupied West Bank for Palestinians, and further cut off East Jerusalem.

The tender, which has not been reported previously, lays out terms for companies to bid for part of the work, with a deadline for submissions in mid-March.

It “reflects an accelerated effort to advance construction in E1”, said Yonatan Mizrachi, a co-director of Settlement Watch with the advocacy group Peace Now, which found the document online.

“This timeline suggests bulldozers could start work in less than a year,” he added. The construction work would seal a land grab the British government has described as “a flagrant breach of international law”.

Building settlements in this area is a decades-old idea with cross-party backing in Israel, mooted initially in the 1990s by Yitzhak Rabin, the Labor prime minister and Nobel peace laureate who was assassinated in 1995 by a rightwing nationalist.

For years, construction was blocked by the US and the country’s European allies, for the same reason that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and key ministers have embraced the plan.

Both critics and supporters agree that moving tens of thousands of Israeli settlers into a triangle of occupied land between Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Ramallah would be critically damaging to efforts to reach a two-state solution.

“Construction in E1 is intended to create irreversible facts on the ground leading to a one-state reality, which all indications suggest would take the form of an apartheid regime,” said Mizrachi.

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who is himself a settler, said last year that Donald Trump had abandoned longstanding US opposition to the E1 plan.

The state department did not comment on Trump’s position, but in August Israeli authorities gave formal planning approval to the project and Smotrich said it would “bury” the idea of a sovereign Palestine.

“Those in the world trying to recognise a Palestinian state will get an answer from us on the ground,” he said at the time. “Not through documents, not through decisions or declarations, but through facts. Facts of homes, neighbourhoods, roads and Jewish families building their lives.”

More than 20 countries including Israeli allies France, Canada, Italy and Australia condemned the decision as an unacceptable violation of international law that risked fuelling further violence.

Undeterred, Israel pressed ahead with construction planning. In September, the ministry of housing signed an agreement to fund infrastructure construction for E1 and the expansion of neighbouring Ma’ale Adumim, at a ceremony presided over by Netanyahu.

“We said there will be no Palestinian state, and indeed there will be no Palestinian state! This place is ours,” Netanyahu said.

Sitting beside him was Smotrich, who has been put under sanctions by countries including the UK, Canada and Australia for “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian communities”, and the leader of the settler organisation Amana, also sanctioned by the UK for supporting and sponsoring violence against Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s enthusiasm has been reflected in the rapid progress towards breaking ground. It would usually take six months to a year to prepare tenders after planning approval for a settlement, rather than just four months for the vast E1 construction, said Hagit Ofran, a settlement expert at Peace Now.

If there is similar speed in other stages of approval and securing contracts, builders could be bringing in bulldozers before national elections due to be held by October.

“I am afraid we will see construction in coming months,” said Ofran. “They are doing whatever they can now to create as much irreversible [change] as possible throughout the West Bank, as fast as possible.”

Winning bids can be selected within days of the tender closing. The next stage is agreeing details of a contract, which usually takes weeks. When the contract is signed, the final step before construction can start is securing building permits from the municipality, which can take months.

The infrastructure deal is with the municipality of neighbouring Ma’ale Adumim, as E1 is formally classified as an extension of that settlement towards Jerusalem, rather than a new project.

It is only one in a series of settlement expansions pursued by a government with an aggressive construction agenda in occupied Palestine.

In December, Israel approved a proposal for 19 new settlements in the occupied West Bank, including two that were previously evacuated under a 2005 plan to withdraw Israeli settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

In 2022, there were 141 settlements across the West Bank. After recently approved settlements are built there will be 210, according to Peace Now.

The Israeli military has already been deployed to areas where settlements were evacuated, to set up bases ahead of the arrival of the new settlers.

There has also been a surge in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and settlers during Israel’s war in Gaza, which a UN commission and Israeli and international rights groups consider genocidal.

Since October 2023, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, at least one in five of them children, and tens of thousands have been forcefully displaced from their homes.

There is little political opposition to attempts to expand Israeli control of the West Bank from any mainstream Israeli political party, and Israeli soldiers and settlers target Palestinians in a climate of widespread impunity.

The UN’s international court of justice (ICJ) in 2024 ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories violated international law. The sweeping advisory opinion ordered Israel to end the occupation “as rapidly as possible” and make full reparations for its “internationally wrongful acts”.