Israel, U.S. Deny Report Claiming Trump Will Recognize Palestinian State

TEL AVIV – An Israeli report claiming that the Trump administration has formulated a peace plan recognizing a Palestinian state without evacuating existing West Bank settlements is untrue, American and Israeli officials said. 

Saturday’s Israel Television News (formerly Channel 2) report said that President Donald Trump would offer statehood to the Palestinians that would include land swaps but would “not necessarily” be based on the 1967 lines. In addition, no Palestinian would be required to relocate and the Palestinian Authority would receive hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from Sunni Arab states as an incentive for PA President Mahmoud Abbas to accept the terms of the deal. Israel’s security needs, including the deployment of forces along the border with Jordan, were also said to have been met in the proposal. 

The report said the plan, which is due to be released in the coming months, will not deal with the issue of Jerusalem or transferring the U.S. embassy to the Israeli capital.

The terms of the deal would be open to negotiation and neither side would have anything imposed on it.

The report quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as telling his ministers that in the history of the U.S.’s relationship with Israel, no president has been as forthcoming as Trump and Israel can never hope to receive a better proposal.

A White House statement said the report was inaccurate.

“There is constant speculation and guessing about what we are working on and this report is more of the same,” the official told the Times of Israel. “It is not an accurate representation, rather it is a mix of possibilities and ideas that have existed for decades.”

“What we can say is we are engaged in a productive dialogue with all relevant parties and are taking a different approach than the past to create an enduring peace deal,” the official added. “We are not going to put an artificial deadline on anything and we have no imminent plans beyond continuing our conversations. As we have always said, our job is to facilitate a deal that works for both Israelis and Palestinians, not to impose anything on them.”