Daniel Kurtzer, who served in Tel Aviv as the U.S. ambassador to Israel during the George W. Bush administration, accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline government of breaking a 2004 deal with Washington by legalizing a group of nationalist and religious settlements in the West Bank, The Guardian reported. He urged the Biden administration to take further steps in preventing Israel’s “creeping annexation.”

He told the paper that it is a “significant violation” of a commitment that the Israeli government made with the U.S. to dismantle illegal outposts and illegal settlements.

“Now you’ve come full circle,” he said. “Not only are they not dismantling these illegal outposts, but they’re trying to legalize them ex post facto. And there have been many that have been built since that time, so that the number is really quite significant.”