Israel refuses withdrawal
Country’s prime minister refuses to uproot settlements in West Bank as talks stall
JERUSALEM— Israel’s prime minister on Tuesday vowed to never uproot any West Bank settlement — just days after a White House envoy was in the region trying to restart peace talks with the Palestinians.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments enraged the Palestinians and raised new questions about the slow start for U.S. peace efforts led by White House adviser Jared Kushner.
Netanyahu spoke at a ceremony Monday night in Barkan, a settlement in the northern West Bank.
“We have returned here for good,” Netanyahu said. “There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the Land of Israel. Settlements will not be uprooted.”
“There is no Plan B for the twostate solution,” said UN SecretaryGeneral Antonio Guterres said Tuesday after meeting Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Ham- dallah. “We believe that settlement activity is illegal under international law. It’s an obstacle to the two-state solution.”
The Palestinians seek all of the West Bank, along with East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, for an independent state alongside Israel. Israel captured all three areas in the 1967 Mideast war, though it withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
The Palestinians say that settlements on occupied lands are illegal and undermine the goal of a twostate solution by gobbling up land — a position that is widely backed by the international community.
Israel demolished 21 settlements when it withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, along with four of the more than 100 in the West Bank. About 400,000 Israelis live in the settlements amid almost three million Palestinians who have limited autonomy in their cities and are subject to Israeli military law elsewhere in the territory.
Last week’s visit by the U.S. negotiating team , led by Kushner, left Palestinians impatient for a U.S. plan that might renew peace talks, which have been frozen since 2014.
“They promised to come back in a few weeks with clearer answers,” Hamdallah said of the U.S. negotiators at a news conference with the UN chief.
After several visits to Ramallah and meetings in Washington, Kushner and fellow U.S. negotiator Jason Greenblatt have shown little sympathy for the Palestinian plight and appear to have adopted Netanyahu’s positions, said Jehad Harb, a researcher at the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah.
“They didn’t have high hopes,” Harb said. Accepting U.S. proposals to stop government payments to prisoners in Israeli jails convicted of terrorist acts “would be political suicide for any Palestinian leader,” he said.
Since his election, U.S. President Donald Trump has broken with the policies of his predecessors and refused to endorse the two-state solution. In turn, Netanyahu has also taken a harder line and no longer speaks of establishing a Palestinian state. With files from Bloomberg