US Secretary of State Mike Pomepo announced at a press conference on Monday that the US will reverse its long-standing stance on Israeli settlements in the West Bank region, no longer holding that the settlements violate international law.

The West Bank has been a zone of contention since Israel occupied the region following the Six Days War in 1967. Although Israel has exerted military control over the area since, it has never formally annexed it, instead opting for Israeli citizens to “voluntarily” settle enclaves in the region. Since the administration of President Jimmy Carter, both the US and the international community have maintained that Israeli settlements in the West Bank violate international law and harm the ongoing peace process in the region. They argue that Israel’s policy of resettling civilians in contested regions violates Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention’s prohibition on occupying powers transferring their population into occupied territory. The UN Security Council reaffirmed this stance as recently as 2016, passing a resolution calling on Israel to remove the settlements for their “flagrant violation of international law.”

In his statement, Pompeo described the previous approach by the US government as “inconsistent” and said that adopting a per se illegality for all settlements in the West Bank “hasn’t advanced the cause of peace.” Pompeo said that the Trump administration was not taking a position over whether individual settlements were in violation of international law and encouraged Israeli courts to adjudicate the legality of each settlement separately. He described the situation in the West Bank as a “complex political problem that can only be solved by negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians” and affirmed the US’s commitment to continuing the peace process.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz welcomed the announcement, thanking the Trump administration for its “consistent and steadfast support of Israel” and stating that “there is no dispute about the right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.”

The move was widely condemned by the international community, however. The EU, in a statement delivered by foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, said that “the European Union’s position on Israeli settlement policy in the occupied Palestinian territory is clear and remains unchanged: all settlement activity is illegal under international law.” British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn tweeted that he “stands by the UN resolution” that the settlements are illegal, while Jordan Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said that Pompeo’s announcement would “kill [the] 2-state solution.”