Trump vows to block West Bank annexation after Knesset vote

One day after the Knesset passed a preliminary vote to apply Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank, U.S. President Donald Trump pledged in a new interview published Thursday that he will not permit such a move.

“It won’t happen. It won’t happen,” Trump told TIME magazine, adding, “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… Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.

In the wide‑ranging interview, conducted last week, Trump also addressed multiple Middle East issues, including normalization with Saudi Arabia, talks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and the proposed release of high-profile convicted Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, ultimately not freed. The magazine devoted its cover to “Trump’s world” following a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

The president said that he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he couldn’t “fight the world” in a conversation they had on October 4. He noted that “the world was tired of us attacking… I said to Bibi, ‘Bibi, you can’t fight the world. You can fight individual battles, but the world’s against you. And Israel is a very small place compared to the world.’”

According to Trump, “I stopped him, because he would have just kept going. It could have gone on for years. It would have gone on for years. And I stopped him, and everybody came together when I stopped, it was amazing. And when he made that one tactical mistake, the one on Qatar, and that was terrible, but actually, and I actually told the emir, this was one of the things that brought us all together, because it was so out of joint that it sort of got everybody to do what they have to do.”

The president also claimed that he planned to visit the Gaza Strip, but did not specify when or how. “I will. Yeah, I will,” he replied. “[W]e have the Board of Peace, and it’s set up. They asked me to be the chairman. It was not something I wanted to do, believe me, but the Board of Peace is going to be a very powerful group of people, and it’s going to have a lot of power in terms of the Middle East. The Middle East has never been brought together. It’s really been brought together now, other than Hamas, which is a fringe group, and Hamas has, in theory, been brought together too, they signed the document. You know, they agreed to all this stuff. Now they can go against it. That’s fine, and then nobody would mind if we went in and took them to task.”

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