Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that the Zionist entity has begun to draw up maps of land in the occupied West Bank that will be annexed in accordance with U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan, so-called “Deal of the Century”.
“We are already at the height of the process of mapping the area that, according to the Trump plan, will become part of the state of Israel,” Netanyahu said at an election campaign rally in the so-called Maale Adumim settlement, referring to the occupation entity.
“This won’t take a lot of time and we’ll complete this,” Netanyahu added, without further specifying.
Commenting on Netanyahu’s remarks, Nabil Abu Rdainah, spokesman for Palestinian Authority Chief Mahmoud Abbas said: “The only map that can be accepted as the map of Palestine is the map of the Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Al-Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital.”
Prospects for annexations, which have already been widely condemned, are unclear.
Immediately after Trump announced the release of his proposal during a January 28 White House ceremony attended by Netanyahu, the Israeli premier told reporters he planned to bring his plan to annex the Jordan Valley and West Bank settlements for cabinet approval within days.
US’ Kushner
Though US Ambassador to the Zionist entity David Friedman initially signaled American support for moving ahead immediately with annexation, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner clarified the next day that the Trump administration expected Netanyahu to wait at least until a new Israeli government is formed sometime after the March 2 vote.
Kushner on Thursday (February 6) said it will likely take “a couple of months” to complete work on detailed West Bank maps before the Zionist entity will be able to annex settlements and the Jordan Valley.
Speaking to reporters at the United Nations, Kushner said he and his team would follow up with the announcement shortly that a US-Israeli commission is being established to turn its “conceptual map” into a detailed map with the goal of making sure “you can have contiguous territory” for a Palestinian state.
Source: Reuters and Israeli media
