President Donald Trump has said he will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank, warning that Israel would lose US support if it does.
“It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries… Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened,” Trump told TIME magazine in an interview published yesterday.
Israeli legislators on Wednesday voted in favour of advancing two bills on annexing the occupied West Bank.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said that the government had not decided to bring the vote on annexation forward at this stage in order to ensure the success of Trump’s multi-stage Gaza plan.
Settlement building has been expanding rapidly since 2022 when Netanyahu’s government – the most right-wing in Israeli history with ultra-nationalist coalition partners who seek annexation of both the West Bank and Gaza – came to power.
US Vice President JD Vance, who is visiting Israel, said the annexation vote looked like a stupid ‘political stunt’.
Asked by reporters about the vote, Vance said: “If it was a political stunt, it was a very stupid one, and I personally take some insult to it.”
Vance spoke after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that steps toward annexing the territory, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, could endanger Trump’s plan to end the Gaza war, which has yielded a shaky ceasefire so far.
&uuid=(email))