⁍ The West Bank settlement of Ariel was chosen as the venue for a ceremony opening a new avenue of U.S. scientific cooperation with Israeli researchers.

---

⁍ Palestinians, who seek the West Bank for a future state, said the move made Washington complicit in what they termed Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.

---

– In what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “an important victory against all those who seek to delegitimise everything Israeli beyond the 1967 lines,” the Trump administration on Wednesday lifted a ban on US taxpayer funding scientific research in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The ban, which had been in place since 1977, was lifted at a ceremony in Ariel, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, Reuters reports. “The Trump vision … opens Judea and Samaria to academic, commercial, and scientific engagement with the United States,” Netanyahu said at the ceremony. “This is an important victory against all those who seek to delegitimise everything Israeli beyond the 1967 lines.” David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel, said $1.4 billion had been invested by three US-Israeli research cooperation funds since 1972. A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said lifting of the funding ban represented ‘American participation in the occupation of Palestinian lands.’ The Trump administration last year effectively backed Israel’s right to build West Bank settlements by abandoning a long-held US position that they were ‘inconsistent with international law.’