Hello and welcome to NewsHour.
It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in London.
I'm Tim Franks.
We're beginning with a major development with Israel and the Palestinians.
And yes, I am saying Palestinians because we're not just going to be talking about Gaza,
although we'll get onto that in a moment with another day of chaos around the distribution of aid to the starving people there.
But we're going to begin by looking not south to the Gaza Strip,
but east to what's called the West Bank,
the West Bank of the Jordan River,
in other words, where the majority of Palestinians live.
but also where there are hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers.
And today,
the Israeli government announced the creation of 22 new settlements in what the rest of the world regards as occupied territory.
In other words, somewhere that Israel is not,
under international law, allowed to settle its population in,
and which much of the rest of the world says should be a good chunk of the territory for any future Palestinian state,
however distant that prospect might look.
The map's been changing for a while as the number of settlers and settlements has grown.
But today's announcement is being seen as a potential game changer, even in that context.
Elisha Ben-Kimon is a journalist with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot and is one of Israel's best connected reporters to the settler movement.