US President-elect Donald Trump told the Time magazine, Thursday, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows he wants the Gaza genocide war to end.
“The Middle East is going to get solved. I think it’s more complicated than the Russia-Ukraine, but I think it’s easier to solve,” Trump said, according to a transcript of the interview.
The interview appears in the upcoming issue of Time, which named Trump as “Person of the Year” for the second time, the first being after he first won the White House in 2016.
Speaking about the Israeli assault in Gaza, Trump said Netanyahu “knows I want it to end.”
According to Time, Trump informed Netanyahu of his stance during phone calls the two held during the US election campaign according to the Quds News Network.
Asked if Netanyahu has given him assurances about ending the Gaza war, Trump declined to respond directly, saying, “I don’t want people from either side killed… whether it’s the Palestinians and the Israelis and all of the different entities that we have in the Middle East.”
When Time asked if he trusted Netanyahu going into the second term, Trump took a second before answering: “I don’t trust anybody.”
Asked if he still supports his 2020 “deal of the century,” Trump claimed: “I support a plan of peace, and it can take different forms.”
“I support whatever solution we can do to get peace. There are other ideas other than two-state, but I support whatever is necessary to get not just peace, [but] a lasting peace. It can’t go on where every five years you end up in tragedy. There are other alternatives,” he said.
In the Time interview, Trump also would not come out against a possible Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
Asked whether he still stands behind his “deal of the century,” or if he would let Israel proceed with the annexation, Trump responded: “What I want is a deal where there’s going to be peace and where the killing stops.”
Asked again if he would prevent Netanyahu from annexing the West Bank, Trump avoided responding directly. Instead, he acknowledged having stopped Netanyahu from taking the step.
“There are numerous ways you can do it. You can do it two-state, but there are numerous ways it can be done,” Trump reiterated. “I’d like to see everybody be happy. Everybody goes about their lives, and people stop from dying. That includes on many different fronts.”
On January 28, 2020, Trump formally announced his long-awaited Middle East Peace Plan to resolve the seven-decade-long Israel’s occupation of Palestine. He hailed it as “the deal of the century”. It controversially accepts Israeli calls to annex the Jordan Valley and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and recognizes all parts of occupied East Jerusalem as part of Israel’s capital. These include large parts of the city where more than 300,000 Palestinians live, the Old City and holy sites, including the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The plan says a Palestinian state would be established only when Palestinian leadership wholly accepts Israel’s new borders, disarms completely, removes Hamas from power in Gaza and agrees to Israeli security oversight on all of its territories until a point in the future deemed ripe for withdrawal.
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