Pompeo to visit Israel next week

Monitoring Desk

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will visit Israel next week and meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White party chief Benny Gantz, according to several Hebrewmedia outlets.

The Ynet website says Pompeo’s visit will focus both on the new government being established in Israel and on Israel’s plan to move forward with annexing parts of the West Bank under the Trump administration’s peace plan.

There is no official confirmation of the report at this time.

Asked about the matter during a press briefing in Washington this morning, the secretary says: “I don’t have any travel to confirm, but I think in the upcoming hours and days you’ll see an announcement.”

Israel announced a plan for thousands of new Jewish settlement homes in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday as Washington voiced readiness to back de facto Israeli annexations there. Netanyahu wants to ally with political rival Benny Gantz and start cabinet discussions on July 1 about declaring Israeli sovereignty over settlements and the strategically key Jordan Valley in the West Bank. The unity government deal has been contested in Israel’s top court.

Fresh construction for the settlement of Efrat was approved on land that could accommodate around 7,000 housing units, Defence Minister Naftali Bennett’s office said on Wednesday.

“The building momentum in the country must not be stopped, even for a second,” tweeted Bennett, a religious-nationalist in Netanyahu’s current caretaker government.

The settlements are deemed illegal by most world powers and condemned by the Palestinians, who see all the West Bank, which Israel captured in a 1967 war, as theirs for a future state. The US has offered to recognise Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank as part of a proposal President Trump unveiled in Feb-ruary, which also envisages talks on founding a Pales-tinian state in up to 70% of the territory. The newspaper Israel Hayom quoted U.S. Ambassador to Israel Friedman as saying that sovereignty in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley was “an Israeli issue” and adding: “We are ready.”