Settlements - Page 2

TEL AVIV – French presidential frontrunner Emmanuel Macron on Sunday slammed the boycott movement against Israel as anti-Semitic and said that recognizing a Palestinian state at this stage would serve no purpose.

A senior Israeli official on Thursday denied reports that the Trump administration has demanded Israel stop all construction in isolated West Bank settlements and put curbs on new building inside the major settlement blocs.

TEL AVIV – President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy met for five hours Monday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the Trump administration’s attempt to jumpstart the moribund peace process with the Palestinians.

TEL AVIV – Legislation blocking anti-Israel boycott activists from entering the country passed at the Knesset with 46-28 in the final reading on Monday.

TEL AVIV – The meeting between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu marked a “symbolic reset of relations” after eight years of “tension” between the two countries, a top American foreign policy expert said on Friday.

WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will continue trying to reach a mutual understanding on Israeli settlement activity, the administration said Wednesday night, hours after the leaders concluded their first summit since Trump took office last month.

U.S.-Israel relations were restored to their customary warmth, while Trump and Netanyahu also indicated five new directions for future policy.

TEL AVIV – Germany cancelled an upcoming summit between its government and Israel’s, reportedly as a result of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s growing frustration with settlement activity.

TEL AVIV – A new bill to annex the settlements around Jerusalem will be submitted to the Knesset this week, The Jerusalem Post reported.

TEL AVIV – The American people made a historic mistake in democratically electing President Donald Trump just as the Germans did when they elected Hitler and Gaza Palestinians did with their election of Hamas, a Palestinian columnist said, joining a chorus of Palestinian commentators who are slamming the new president as a “fascist,” “lunatic,” and “megalomaniac.”

Advancing settlement activity is not helpful to peace, US President Donald Trump said ahead of his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

TEL AVIV – Following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting in London with his UK counterpart Theresa May, a leading daily in that country said in an editorial that “maintaining good relations with Israel is vital to British interests” and will help protect against the Islamic State.

TEL AVIV — The Trump administration responded to the recent passage of Israel’s controversial settlements regulation bill by saying only that the president would discuss it when he meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later this month.

The mainstream media are abuzz with reports that President Donald Trump has come out against Israeli settlements. The New York Times was exultant: “Trump Embraces Pillars of Obama’s Foreign Policy,” it crowed.

Several hundred Israeli security forces have begun the operation to evacuate 40 Jewish families from the Amona outpost in the West Bank on Wednesday morning following hours of delay, police said.

With the evacuation of the Amona outpost looming, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Tuesday approved the construction of around 3,000 new homes in the West Bank, some of them outside settlement blocs Israel hopes to keep in a future peace deal with the Palestinians.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said there would be “dangerous consequences” following Israel’s announcement on Tuesday approving the construction of 2,500 housing units in settlements in the West Bank, Israel Radio reported Thursday morning.

Plans are underway to officially present a bill that would apply Israeli sovereignty to the large east Jerusalem settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, leaders of the Knesset’s Land of Israel lobby announced Tuesday.

TEL AVIV – The anti-settlement resolution “inspired the terrorist in Jerusalem” to carry out the truck-ramming attack last week, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations told the Security Council Tuesday.

I predict that when the Obama administration is over, we will still continue to hear John Kerry bloviating about how Israel is the reason there is no peace.

TEL AVIV – A senior aide to President Barack Obama made the wildly exaggerated claim in an interview on PBS that Israel was constructing “tens of thousands” of new settlements in the West Bank, an error that prompted the network’s ombudsman to demand a “clarifying or correcting” statement from the news program on Friday.

TEL AVIV – The Paris peace summit on Sunday, in which neither Israel nor the Palestinians were represented, was “like having marriage counseling with neither the husband nor the wife present,” a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told BBC News.

TEL AVIV – In a dramatic development following the Paris peace summit on Sunday, the United Kingdom refused to sign a joint declaration calling for a two-state solution, saying the document may “harden” the Palestinian stance for negotiations.

TEL AVIV – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas praised the final communique of the Paris peace summit on Sunday, saying it “reaffirmed” the recent UN Security Council resolution attacking Israeli settlements.

TEL AVIV – The U.S. will prevent any further action against Israel at the UN and would work to soften the final text of a resolution emerging from the Paris peace summit, Secretary of State John Kerry told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone conversation on Sunday.

TEL AVIV – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday denounced the Paris peace summit as “pointless” and the “final palpitations” of yesterday’s world.

TEL AVIV – Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem as per President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promise is a “provocation” that would result in “serious consequences,” France warned at Sunday’s peace summit in Paris.

TEL AVIV – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday reiterated the claim that Israel has “unequivocal” evidence of the Obama administration’s involvement in orchestrating the anti-settlement resolution passed by the UN Security Council last month.

TEL AVIV – The Knesset Internal Affairs Committee on Wednesday approved a bill banning boycott Israel activists from entering the country.

JERUSALEM – A majority of Israeli Jews support settlement construction and believe President Barack Obama to have been “unfriendly” towards Israel during his tenure, a new survey published in the wake of the anti-settlements United Nations Security Council shows.

JERUSALEM – President Barack Obama on Monday denied betraying Israel by not using the U.S. veto for an anti-settlement resolution at the United Nations Security Council last month.

TEL AVIV – If President-elect Donald J Trump makes good on his promise to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, it would be considered “a declaration of war” on all Muslims, the Palestinian Authority’s supreme Sharia judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash declared on Friday.

TEL AVIV – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday for disavowing the UN Security Council’s resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity as a “flagrant violation of international law.”

MAALE ADUMIM – Israel “would only be acting on the property it already owns” if it annexed the West Bank, former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said.

JERUSALEM/ MAALE ADUMIM – Mike Huckabee slammed the United Nations as a “farce” for caring more about “Israelis building bedrooms” in the settlements than the threats posed by Iran and the human rights violations of Syria and North Korea.

TEL AVIV – Education Minister Naftali Bennett on Sunday said he was advancing legislation to extend Israeli sovereignty to the Jerusalem satellite city of Ma’ale Adumim.