QUITO: Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday criticized France and other countries moving to recognize a Palestinian state, saying he warned them Israel may respond by annexing the West Bank.
Rubio declined to join global condemnation of efforts by members of the Israeli government to annex the occupied West Bank in hopes of destroying prospects of an independent Palestinian state.
“What you’re seeing with the West Bank and the annexation, that’s not a final thing – that’s something being discussed among some elements of Israeli politics. I’m not going to opine on that today,” Rubio told reporters in Ecuador.
“What I am going to tell you is it was wholly predictable,” he said.
“We told all these countries before they went out and they did this… there wasn’t going to be a Palestinian state, because that’s not the way a Palestinian state is going to happen, because they have a press conference somewhere.
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“We told them that it would lead to these sort of reciprocal actions and it would make a ceasefire harder,” Rubio said.
He also repeated his charge that the push to elevate the Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, emboldened rival Hamas in Gaza.
“The minute – the day – that the French announced the thing they did, that day, Hamas walked away from the negotiating table,” Rubio said.
French President Emmanuel Macron has called a UN summit for September 22 where he will recognize a Palestinian state, voicing exasperation at the dire humanitarian situation and what he sees as Israeli intransigence.
On Wednesday, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for annexation of swaths of the West Bank with an aim to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state” after countries including Belgium, Canada and Australia joined the French push on statehood.
The United Arab Emirates – which took the landmark step of normalizing relations with Israel in 2020 in the so-called Abraham Accords – quickly warned that annexation was a “red line” that would “severely undermine” the agreement, seen by both US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a legacy-defining achievement.
Trump has been an outspoken supporter of Israel in its relentless assault in Gaza that followed the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
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