ANALYSIS
As the UN warns of a dismemberment of Palestinian territory, Singapore finds itself at a diplomatic inflection point — balancing a decades-long security partnership with Israel, the sensitivities of its Muslim majority, and its foundational commitment to international law.
Feature | 19 February 2026
On Wednesday, 19 February 2026, UN Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo stood before the Security Council and delivered a stark assessment: Israel was engaged in the “gradual de facto annexation” of the West Bank. The accusation was not new in spirit, but the institutional weight behind it — and the breadth of the 85-nation coalition that backed it — signalled a qualitative escalation in international censure. For Singapore, a city-state that has spent the past two years carefully recalibrating its posture on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the latest developments present a convergence of pressures that touch on diplomacy, domestic social cohesion, economic interests, and the foundational principles of the international rules-based order to which Singapore has consistently appealed.
The measures approved by the Israeli government since mid-February 2026 — including a plan to register large swathes of West Bank land as Israeli state property unless Palestinians can prove ownership, dismantling bureaucratic barriers to settlement expansion in sensitive areas including Hebron, and extending Israeli civil authority into zones currently governed by the Palestinian Authority — represent the most aggressive unilateral redrawing of the West Bank’s administrative landscape since the Oslo Accords divided the territory into Areas A, B, and C in the 1990s. Taken together, analysts describe them not as incremental policy shifts but as a structural transformation of the territorial and legal architecture of a future Palestinian state.
“Singapore cannot recognise any unilateral annexation of occupied territory, because this would be a flagrant breach of international law.” — Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, September 2025
The Architecture of Creeping Annexation
To understand the significance of the February 2026 measures, it is necessary to situate them within the trajectory of Israeli policy in the West Bank since October 2023. The Gaza conflict provided both the political cover and the institutional momentum for what far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir had long described as a “settlement revolution.” Under the Oslo framework, Area C — comprising approximately 60 percent of the West Bank — was already under Israeli military and civil control. What the new measures now target are Areas A and B, the zones formally administered by the Palestinian Authority, which form the backbone of any viable contiguous Palestinian state.
The land registration proposal is particularly significant. By inverting the burden of proof — requiring Palestinians to affirmatively demonstrate ownership rather than requiring Israel to demonstrate grounds for acquisition — the mechanism operationalises dispossession through administrative procedure rather than outright military seizure. Political analyst Xavier Abu Eid, based in Ramallah, described the approach aptly: Israel is “packing annexation” into a “bureaucratic move.” UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the process risked the “dispossession of Palestinians of their property” on a wide scale, citing the landmark 2024 International Court of Justice advisory opinion that declared Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza unlawful.
The removal of building permit barriers and easing of land purchase restrictions in Hebron carries its own symbolic charge. Hebron — divided between the predominantly Palestinian city of Al-Khalil and a heavily guarded Jewish settlement enclave — has long functioned as a microcosm of the conflict’s most intractable dimensions. The extension of settlement infrastructure into Hebron signals that no area of the West Bank is insulated from the current government’s expansionist ambitions.
Singapore’s Evolving Posture: From Principled Neutrality to Graduated Pressure
Singapore’s engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has historically been characterised by what Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan has described as a “realist” foreign policy — one that pays attention to objective reality, triangulates between national unity, security imperatives, and international law, and resists being swept along by regional or ideological currents. This has meant, for most of Singapore’s post-independence history, maintaining a distinctive dual position: warm bilateral ties with Israel (including significant defence and intelligence cooperation going back to Israel’s covert role in building the Singapore Armed Forces in the 1960s) while consistently voting at the UN in support of Palestinian rights and the two-state solution.
That calibrated equilibrium has been under sustained pressure since October 2023, and the pressure has materially shifted Singapore’s posture. The trajectory is now clear in its direction even if incremental in its pace. In early 2024, Balakrishnan stated that Israel’s military actions had “gone too far.” In May 2024, Singapore joined 143 nations in supporting the UN resolution on Palestinian UN membership. In July 2025, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly condemned Israel for the denial of humanitarian aid to Gaza as a violation of international humanitarian law — the first time Singapore had used such direct condemnatory language against Israel. In September 2025, before parliament, Balakrishnan announced targeted financial sanctions and entry bans against leaders of extremist Israeli settler organisations — explicitly naming Meir Mordechai Ettinger, Elisha Yered, Ben-Zion Gopstein, and Baruch Marzel — and stated that Singapore could not recognise any unilateral annexation of occupied territory.
The November 2025 formalisation of those sanctions — financial asset freezes and entry bans on four named settlers — was, as MP Saktiandi Supaat noted in parliament, not a step taken lightly for a country that functions as a global financial hub. Singapore had aligned itself with the EU, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan in taking targeted individual measures, while carefully stopping short of broader sanctions on the Israeli state or Israeli financial entities. The threshold for escalation beyond individual-level measures remains the question that now confronts Singapore’s foreign policy apparatus with fresh urgency.
“If the situation continues to deteriorate, or if Israel takes further steps to extinguish a two-state solution, we will reconsider our position on recognising a Palestinian state.” — Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, September 2025
The February 2026 measures represent precisely the kind of “further steps to extinguish a two-state solution” that Balakrishnan flagged as the trigger for reconsidering Palestinian statehood recognition. Singapore is now in a position where its stated conditional threshold has, by most reasonable assessments, been crossed. The question is whether the government will act on that condition, and on what timeline.
The Palestinian Statehood Question: When Does ‘When’ Become Now?
Singapore’s position on Palestinian recognition has been formulated around what Balakrishnan called an “appropriate constellation of factors”: the existence of an effective Palestinian government that renounces terrorism and recognises Israel’s right to exist. This conditionality has provided Singapore with diplomatic manoeuvre room, allowing it to express support for Palestinian rights in principle while deferring formal recognition on practical grounds — most recently, the unresolved question of whether the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, or some yet-to-emerge governing structure would exercise effective authority over Gaza and the West Bank.
The difficulty with this conditionality is that it places the burden of qualification almost entirely on the Palestinian side while remaining largely silent on Israeli obligations. As Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh argued pointedly in September 2025, the precondition of an effective Palestinian government may have become “unrealistic” given the degree to which Israeli policies — military operations in Gaza, settlement expansion in the West Bank, the withholding of Palestinian tax revenues, and now the extension of Israeli civil authority — have systematically undermined the Palestinian Authority’s viability and capacity. If the conditions for recognition are perpetually deferred by actions on the Israeli side, the conditionality risks becoming a permanent deferral masquerading as principled restraint.
A growing number of Singapore’s diplomatic peers — including Norway, Ireland, Spain, and more recently several Global South states — have moved to unconditional recognition as a political statement precisely because they view Israeli actions as having foreclosed the negotiated pathway. Singapore has thus far maintained its distinction, and Balakrishnan’s parliamentary remarks suggest the government remains persuaded that recognition without a clear governance framework on the Palestinian side risks legitimising a trajectory toward a Hamas-administered state, which Singapore’s zero-tolerance stance on terrorism precludes. That logic is coherent on its own terms. Whether it remains sustainable as the West Bank’s legal landscape is progressively transformed is a question that will likely force itself onto the cabinet agenda in the coming months.
Domestic Dimensions: Social Cohesion, Community Sensitivities, and the Limits of Quiet Diplomacy
The foreign policy debate does not exist in a vacuum. Singapore is a society in which approximately 15 percent of the resident population identifies as Malay and Muslim, and in which the conflict in Gaza and the West Bank has been a source of significant emotional and communal resonance since October 2023. Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam acknowledged before parliament that the conflict had created a visible divide in Singapore — between the Malay/Muslim community, which largely experiences the situation through the lens of injustice toward Palestinians, and the Jewish and certain Christian communities, which feel the pain of the October 7 attacks and the security threat to Israel. Between October 2023 and March 2024 alone, Singapore police received 43 reports of alleged offensive remarks or actions targeting Jewish or Muslim community members.
The government’s management of this domestic dimension has been careful and deliberate. The swift intervention against the Israeli embassy’s social media post in March 2024 — in which the embassy was required to take down content noting that “Palestine” was not mentioned in the Quran — was an early illustration of the government’s intent to prevent external actors from exploiting Singapore’s internal community fault lines. The Internal Security Department’s annual threat assessment has flagged the elevated risk of radicalisation inspired by external conflicts, noting that Singapore’s position in a Southeast Asian region with a history of Islamist militancy requires sustained vigilance.
The February 2026 developments will amplify this domestic pressure. Coverage of Israeli land-registration plans, the extension of civil authority into Hebron, and the 85-nation UN condemnation will circulate widely through Singaporean social media ecosystems, activating strong communal responses. The government’s capacity to manage this through the established mechanisms — the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act, interfaith dialogue, community engagement by religious leaders — remains significant but is not inexhaustible. There is a point at which the gap between community sentiment and official foreign policy posture creates its own strains. Singapore’s gradual escalation of its public criticism of Israeli policy may partly reflect a recognition that the government needs to demonstrate meaningful responsiveness to its Muslim community’s concerns, not merely legal compliance with international norms.
Economic Exposure: The Singapore Financial Centre and the Sanctions Architecture
Singapore’s identity as an international financial centre creates a specific exposure to the evolving global sanctions architecture around Israel. As of late 2025, the UK, EU, US, Canada, and Australia had all imposed targeted individual sanctions on extremist settlers, and Singapore had formally joined that coalition. But the question that MP Saktiandi Supaat raised in parliament — about the threshold for Singapore to consider broader financial or economic measures against Israeli entities — has not been answered, and the February 2026 developments will sharpen it.
Singapore’s financial institutions conduct business with Israeli counterparts across banking, capital markets, trade finance, and technology investment. Israel’s technology sector — particularly in cybersecurity, agricultural technology, and defence-adjacent dual-use technologies — has been a meaningful partner for Singapore’s own innovation agenda. These bilateral economic linkages are not enormous in aggregate terms (Israel accounts for a small fraction of Singapore’s total trade), but they are concentrated in strategic sectors and involve professional and corporate networks with significant institutional inertia. A decision to escalate sanctions to entity-level or sector-level measures would have non-trivial compliance costs for Singapore’s financial and professional services sector and would require careful calibration to avoid triggering secondary exposure to US or EU extraterritorial sanctions frameworks.
The more proximate economic risk, however, runs in the opposite direction. Sustained regional instability in the Middle East — including the possibility that the destruction of Palestinian Authority governance capacity in the West Bank could trigger a third intifada or a broader regional conflagration — carries macroeconomic transmission risks for Singapore through energy prices, shipping disruption (the Red Sea corridor remains under stress from Houthi operations), and investor risk sentiment. Singapore’s economy, deeply integrated into global trade and financial flows, is structurally exposed to geopolitical shocks of this kind.
ASEAN, Multilateralism, and the Architecture of International Order
Singapore’s response to the West Bank crisis must also be understood through the lens of its broader investment in the rules-based international order. For a small state without the military capacity to project power, the sanctity of international law — including the prohibition on territorial acquisition by force, the principle of self-determination, and the binding authority of UN Security Council resolutions — is not an abstract principle but a practical security guarantee. Singapore’s consistent invocation of these norms in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict is therefore not merely moral posturing; it is a statement about the kind of international system in which Singapore’s own security and sovereignty are safeguarded.
The February 2026 Security Council meeting also took place in the shadow of another development that touches Singapore’s multilateral interests directly: the emergence of the US-backed “Board of Peace” as a parallel conflict-resolution mechanism under the Trump administration. US Ambassador Mike Waltz’s dismissal of critics as the “chattering classes” and the exclusion of the UN from the Board’s February 19 meeting signal an acceleration of the Trump administration’s preference for bilateral and transactional diplomacy over multilateral processes. Singapore, as a consistent advocate for multilateral institutions and UN-centred conflict resolution, faces a structurally uncomfortable dynamic: its primary security partner (the United States, with which Singapore maintains the 1990 Memorandum of Understanding on US military access to Singapore’s facilities) is simultaneously the actor most directly undercutting the multilateral framework Singapore relies upon.
ASEAN as a body has largely avoided taking a collective position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a function of the bloc’s non-interference norm and the divergent bilateral relationships of its members with Israel (notably, Singapore has historically had the deepest Israel ties of any ASEAN member). Singapore’s willingness to take individual steps — sanctions, public condemnation, conditional recognition commitments — that go beyond the ASEAN consensus signals that it regards this issue as one where national principle overrides regional consensus management. That is itself a significant posture, consistent with Balakrishnan’s statement that Singapore “will not always follow the crowd.”
The Path Ahead: Decision Points for Singapore
Several concrete decision points now confront Singapore’s foreign policy establishment in the wake of the February 2026 developments. The most immediate is whether Singapore will join the 85-nation joint statement condemning the latest Israeli measures. Singapore was among the signatories of that statement — its inclusion is consistent with its September 2025 parliamentary commitments and its voting record at the UN, and refusal to sign would represent a retreat from the trajectory it has publicly charted. The more substantive question is whether Singapore will treat the new Israeli measures as crossing the “extinguishing of a two-state solution” threshold that Balakrishnan identified as the trigger for reconsidering Palestinian statehood recognition.
Beyond recognition, the escalating international debate about broader economic measures against Israel will put pressure on Singapore’s financial regulatory posture. If the UK, EU, or US were to escalate their sanctions architecture — or if Israel’s actions in the West Bank triggered secondary sanctions exposure for financial institutions dealing with entities involved in settlement expansion — Singapore’s financial sector would need rapid guidance. The Monetary Authority of Singapore’s compliance machinery is well-adapted to implementing international sanctions frameworks, but the political decision about which framework to follow (US, EU, or independent Singaporean) involves sovereign choices about alignment that will become increasingly unavoidable.
Finally, the domestic management challenge will intensify. The government will need to continue demonstrating to Singapore’s Muslim community that its policy evolution is substantive and not merely rhetorical — while simultaneously maintaining the communal guardrails that prevent the conflict from becoming a vector for inter-community tension within Singapore. This is a balance that Singapore has managed with considerable skill since October 2023, but the accumulation of events places increasing strain on the mechanisms designed to maintain it.
Conclusion: Small State, Large Stakes
The “gradual de facto annexation” that DiCarlo described before the Security Council is not a distant geopolitical abstraction for Singapore. It intersects with the city-state’s security architecture, its communal social fabric, its role as a financial hub, its investment in multilateral order, and its self-conception as a principled actor in international affairs. The trajectory of Singapore’s response over the past two years — from cautious concern to conditional sanctions to explicit warnings about reconsidering recognition — suggests a government that has accepted the logic of graduated escalation even as it resists the pace that some of its domestic and international interlocutors would prefer.
The February 2026 measures may prove to be the juncture at which the logic of that escalation becomes unavoidable. For a state that has staked so much of its foreign policy identity on the inviolability of international law and the legitimacy of the UN-centred order, the systematic dismantling of the Oslo framework’s territorial architecture — through bureaucratic instruments rather than military conquest, and with the effective acquiescence of the United States — presents a test that is both practical and existential. Singapore’s response in the coming weeks and months will indicate whether its foreign policy realism is capacious enough to accommodate principle in the face of superpower endorsement of the contrary.