Former chairman of the Judea and Samaria Council, Dani Dayan, said Friday that the Jewish presence in the region is an “irreversible” fact. His statement came in response to figures released by the Israeli Interior Ministry, showing nearly 400,000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria.

Dayan is running in the Jewish Home primaries in two weeks’ time, hoping to sit in the Knesset following March elections. The secular advocate for the Jewish settlement movement in Judea and Samaria left the Likud party last month.

“In my period [as Yesha Council Chairman] the population grew by 35 percent, and the growth does not stop, on the contrary,” he told Israel National News.

“The international community understands that there will not be a Palestinian state here, and the left too – Tzipi [Livni] and Yitzhak [Herzog] – should sober up on the thought of what would happen if they abandoned Israel’s security to the [Palestinian Authority] and the terror to follow,” said Dayan.

The new Interior Ministry numbers show 389,250 Jews living in Judea and Samaria, a jump of 15,000 people since 2013. Another 375,000 live in ‘disputed’ neighborhoods of Jerusalem over the 1949 Armistice line, such as French Hill, Sanhedria, Mount of Olives, and Mount Scopus.

Removing such large population in favor of a future Palestinian state whose current proponents say cannot have a Jewish presence will likely prove impossible, as Dayan points out.

Last week, The Palestinian Authority released its census results which claimed Arabs would outnumber Jews in Greater Israel within five years. This claim is not new, as every year or so the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics uses questionable models to project astronomical Palestinian growth alongside minimal Israeli growth.