Near midnight on Tuesday, the Israeli government approved 3,000 more settler housing units in the occupied West Bank. That roughly doubled the amount of proposed new housing units announced in recent days. Then, on Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has come under heavy pressure from rival politicians on the right to take bolder steps to expand settlements, announced that he would promote the establishment of an entirely new West Bank settlement.

Palestinians reacted with weary opposition, in the long absence of any real hope for the renewal of talks working toward a two-state solution, with a full Palestinian state alongside Israel.

“This is a government of settlers that has abandoned the two-state solution and fully embraced the settler agenda,” said Husam Zomlot, the strategic affairs adviser to Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority.

It was a revealing and dramatic day on the chilly hilltops of the West Bank, now occupied for 50 years after Israel’s capture of it from Jordan in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967.

The new construction announcements seemed timed to soothe hard feelings among the Israeli right as hundreds of soldiers and police officers converged early Wednesday on the unauthorized settlement outpost of Amona to evacuate it, days ahead of a court-ordered deadline for its demolition and after more than a decade of legal wrangling. It was built, the courts here say, on privately owned Palestinian land and has become a minefield for Israeli politicians.