Trump says US to pull support if Israel annexes West Bank

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said Israel would lose its crucial backing from the United States if it annexes the occupied West Bank, in a Time magazine interview published Thursday.

Trump’s comments, which Time said were made by telephone on October 15, were published as both Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned against any annexation.

“It won’t happen. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. And you can’t do that now. We’ve had great Arab support,” Trump said when asked what the consequences would be for Israel if it did so.

He added, “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”

ABRAHAM ACCORDS

Trump also told Time that he believed Saudi Arabia would join the Abraham Accords, which normalize relations between Israel and Arab states, by the end of the year.

“Yes, I do. I do,” he said when asked if he thought Riyadh would join in that timeframe.

“See they had a problem. They had a Gaza problem and they had an Iran problem. Now they don’t have those two problems,” he said, referring to Israel’s war in Gaza and Iran’s nuclear program, which US airstrikes targeted earlier this year.

Trump then said that he would be “making a decision” on whether Israel should release high-profile Palestinian prisoner Marwan Barghouti as part of peace moves.

Barghouti — from Hamas’s rival, the Fatah movement — was among the Palestinian prisoners Hamas wanted to see released as part of the Gaza deal, according to Egyptian state-linked media.

Trump has dispatched a stream of top officials to Israel in recent days to shore up the fragile Gaza ceasefire he brokered earlier this month.

Read more: Dar blasts Greater Israel plan, calls for two-state solution

A VERY STUPID, INSULTING ‘POLITICAL STUNT’

Separately, Vance said on Thursday that Trump would oppose Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank and it would not happen, suggesting Israeli lawmakers’ move toward that end looked like a stupid “political stunt”.

A bill applying Israeli law to the West Bank, a move tantamount to annexation of a territory that Palestinians seek for part of a future independent state, won preliminary approval from Israeli lawmakers on Wednesday.

When reporters asked about the vote, Vance said: “If it was a political stunt, it is a very stupid one, and I personally take some insult to it.”

Vance spoke after 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.

Read more: West Bank annexation to endanger Gaza peace plan: Rubio

“The West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel. The policy of President Trump is that the West Bank will not be annexed. This will always be our policy,” Vance said at the end of a two-day visit to Israel.