EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell made the remarks in a statement that he made from Brussels on Tuesday, a day after ending a short tour of the Middle East that had taken him to Jordan and Iran.
“The US initiative, as presented on 28 January, d
Picture taken on January 28, 2020 from the town of Eizariya in the occupied West Bank shows a view of the settlement of Maale Adumim, Israel's largest in the occupied territories. (By AFP)
eparts from these internationally agreed parameters,” Borrell said of Trump’s proposed plan resolving the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
EU governments attach no legal status to the settlements that have been built on the Palestinian territory of the West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights since Israel’s occupation of the lands in 1967, he said, repeating the bloc’s stance on the matter.
Last Tuesday, Trump unveiled the outlines of his so-called ‘deal of the century,’ which envisioned the recognition of Jerusalem al-Quds as Israel’s “capital” — although Palestinians want the occupied holy city’s eastern part as the capital of their future state.
Trump also said that under the plan, Israel would be annexing the settlements that the Israeli regime has built in the West Bank since the occupation.
This is while all previous foreign-mediated agreements between the Palestinians and Israelis as well as repeated United Nations’ resolutions have mandated Tel Aviv to withdraw behind the 1967 borders.
Palestinians, who had already spurned the plot, repeated their opposition to it soon after Trump’s announcement.
Borrell further said, “Steps towards annexation, if implemented, could not pass unchallenged.”
“To build a just and lasting peace, the unresolved final status issues must be decided through direct negotiations between both parties,” Borrell said, noting the issues of the borders of a Palestinian state and the final status of Jerusalem al-Quds were among those still in dispute.
While in Jordan, the European official also said he did not think that the US initiative stood the chance to succeed.
“The experience over the past 50 years has shown that without agreement among all sides, no peace plan has the chance to succeed,” he said amid uniform Palestinian rejection of the scheme.
Earlier in his career, Trump even formally recognized al-Quds as Israel’s “capital,” and Syria’s Golan Heights as the Israeli regime’s “sovereign territory,” exceeding all his predecessors in terms of pro-Tel Aviv favors.
Trump Mideast 'peace plan' on Israeli-Palestinian conflict violates UN resolutions: Russia
Russia has expressed serious doubts over the viability of the US-devised Mideast plan, known as the so-called deal of the century, on Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying it contravenes several UN Security Council’s resolutions on the issue.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, “It's plain enough that some of this plan's provisions do not fully correspond to the relevant resolutions by the UN Security Council.”
Peskov questioned the plan’s feasibility as it drew strong negative reaction from the Arab world, saying, “We see the reaction from the Palestinians, we see the reaction of a wide range of Arab states, which have sided with the Palestinians in rejecting the plan. This, obviously, makes one think about its feasibility.”
His comments, made in an interview with Rossiya-1 channel on Sunday, appear to be the Kremlin's first official response to the contentious US proposal.
US President Donald Trump unveiled his self-proclaimed “deal of the century” during an event at the White House alongside Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in Washington on Tuesday.
All Palestinian groups have unanimously rejected the American president’s highly-provocative initiative that largely meets Israel’s demands in the decades-old conflict while creating a Palestinian state with limited control over its own security and borders.
It enshrines Jerusalem al-Quds as “Israel’s undivided capital” and allows the regime to annex settlements in the occupied West Bank and the Jordan Valley. The plan also denies the right of return of Palestinian refugees into their homeland, among other controversial terms.
On Saturday, the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by Mahmoud Abbas, cut all ties with Washington and Tel Aviv, including those relating to security, after strongly rejecting the so-called peace plan put forward by the US president.
Abbas announced the decision while in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, to address an emergency meeting of the Arab League, which also rejected the proposal, citing its unfairness to the Palestinian cause.
The controversial pro-Tel Aviv scheme also triggered waves of protest rallies across the Arab and Muslin world.
Palestinians had already stopped recognizing any intermediary role by Washington in late 2017, when Trump recognized the holy city of Jerusalem al-Quds in the Tel Aviv-occupied West Bank as the Israeli “capital.”
Washington’s move, which triggered countless of protest rallies in the West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip, came in the face of historic Palestinian demands that the city’s eastern part serve as the capital of their future state.