Israeli lawmakers voted Wednesday, December 7 to advance a bill legalising some 4,000 settler homes in the occupied West Bank despite international criticism and warnings over its implications, AFP reports.

Fifty-seven members of the parliament, or Knesset, voted to approve the draft legislation in the first of three readings, while 51 were against it.

Supporters of the bill submitted by the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday called it a step towards eventual annexation of most of the West Bank.

Some 400,000 Israeli settlers currently live in the West Bank, excluding annexed east Jerusalem, along with 2.6 million Palestinians.

The United States, UN officials and the European Union have warned that continued settlement building is eating away at the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict.

All Israeli settlements are viewed as illegal under international law and major stumbling blocks to peace efforts as they are built on land the Palestinians see as part of their future state.

Israel differentiates between those it has authorised and those it has not. The bill would legalise nearly 4,000 settler homes built on private Palestinian land.

Key figures in Netanyahu's coalition, considered the most right-wing in Israeli history, openly oppose a Palestinian state.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett, the bill's main backer, has advocated annexing most of the West Bank, like other Israeli religious nationalists who point to the Jewish connection to the land from biblical times.

Netanyahu says he still supports a two-state solution to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but is nonetheless supporting the bill.