The US president warned that it would lose its support if it annexed , in an interview he gave to Time magazine, which was published today.
When asked about annexation plans, the US president replied: “That’s not going to happen. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries” in the Gaza Strip ceasefire negotiations. “And you can’t do that now, Israel would lose all US support if that happened,” he added.
According to the magazine, the interview was conducted over the phone on October 15.
and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who arrived in Israel today, expressed strong dismay after the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, voted to debate two bills that extend Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, Palestinian territory captured by Israel in the 1967 war.
Implications for Washington
For Washington, such a plan would be detrimental to efforts to consolidate the fragile truce, after two years of devastating war, in the Gaza Strip.
In his interview, Trump also talked about how he pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to get him to accept his peace plan. “You can’t fight the whole world,” he reportedly told him. “You know, I stopped him because he was just going to keep going. It (the war) could last years,” he added.
Trump said he was confident Saudi Arabia would normalize relations with Israel by the end of the year. “The Iranian threat no longer exists. We have peace in the Middle East,” he assured, adding that he “knew” that (Arab) countries would join “very quickly” the so-called Abraham Accords. When asked if this will happen before the end of the year, he replied “yes, I think so”.
The US president also spoke of what he sees as a lack of real leadership on the Palestinian side, although he praised his relationship with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He said he would “make a decision” on whether Israel should release Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader serving a life sentence in Israeli prisons.
