“It can take years to decide, and without a court ruling, we cannot get close,” lamented the spokesman. “Meanwhile, they are still building. We can’t do anything about it.” The spokesman said that going to court “can take half a year – or four years. There is no specific time. Each case is different. We have some cases that were opened 15 years ago.”

Once the court rules, if Israel takes enforcement action with bulldozers, the international headlines, EU accusations of war crimes, threats of sanctions, close-up photos of weeping people and the overall global uproar make being legally right a very unappealing political idea. The EU NGOs and illegal settlers know this.

What makes the Palestinian settlements “illegal” is the thin wisp of Oslo that remains. The accords have now been fractured so many times that what remains is only the preserved corpse of a long-deceased vision.

At the end of July 2019, when the Israeli cabinet voted to authorise an extra 715 permits, the Palestinian response was immediate. Shtayyeh declared: “We don’t need permission from the occupying power to build our homes on our lands,” adding that the Oslo classification of land into A, B, and C “no longer exists.”

Before year’s end, the PA is expected to issue thousands of new permits further circumventing Oslo. As Palestinian expansion roils across Area C, the prospect looms of Gaza fence-style encounters coming soon to a hill in Judea and Samaria.

As Area C dynamics become clearer, still murky is the source and route of the diverse European funding that enables this confrontation. What’s more, there is widespread fear that millions in funds are continuously funnelled through entities openly accused of being affiliated with established terrorist organisations.