JERUSALEM:
Israel’s foreign minister branded an international push to recognise Palestinian statehood a “mistake” on Sunday and warned it could trigger an unspecified unilateral response, after reports that Israel plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank.
Several countries, including France and Britain, have pledged to recognise a Palestinian state during the UN General Assembly later this month.
Israel’s relations with France have been particularly strained since President Emmanuel Macron announced his country’s plans and co-chaired a conference in July with Saudi Arabia to call for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Britain said it would recognise a Palestinian state if Israel failed to agree to a truce in the Gaza war, triggered by Palestinian group Hamas’s October 2023 attack.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said Sunday that such recognition “will destabilise the region” and would make it “harder to get to the peace”.
“It will push Israel also to have unilateral decisions,” Saar said at a joint press conference with his visiting Danish counterpart, Lars Lokke Rasmussen.
“States like France and the UK that pushed the so-called recognition had made a tremendous mistake,” he added.
Rasmussen said Denmark does not plan a similar move.
“We will never… recognise a Palestinian state which is ruled by Hamas or any other terrorist organisation,” he said.
“And therefore it comes with a lot of preconditions — a disarmed Palestinian state recognising Israel, transparency, democracy… That is our position.”
The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said recognising a Palestinian state would be “disastrous”.
Meanwhile, Jordan’s King Abdullah II affirmed on Sunday “Jordan’s absolute refusal of any Israeli measures to annex the West Bank and displace Palestinians, and of any plans for the future of Gaza that involve displacing its population or separating it from the West Bank”, a Jordanian royal court statement said.
Israel has annexed east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau it captured from Syria, both seized during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.