“It is a threat to the peace agreement”

Anger in the United States with the bill approved this Wednesday by the Israeli Parliament to annex the territory of the occupied West Bank. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubioprecisely before getting on a plane to Tel Aviv, warned that this measure means a “threat” to the fragile ceasefire declared in the Gaza Strip after two years of invasion.

“The president [Donald Trump] He has made sure that we cannot support him right now. And we believe that it even threatens the peace agreement,” Rubio stressed when asked by journalists. “They are a democracy. They are going to have their votes. People are going to take a stand. But right now we think it could be counterproductive“he added.

The Israeli Parliament (the Knesset) approved this Wednesday, in a preliminary reading with 25 votes in favor and 24 against, a proposal to annex the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank. This is a first step that precedes three other votes for the project to become law.

A law that would state that “the State of Israel will apply its laws and sovereignty to the settlement areas in Judea and Samaria, to establish the status of these areas as inseparable part of the sovereign State of Israel“.

The vote took place during the visit of the vice president JD Vance to reinforce the ceasefire plan in Gaza and despite the opposition already expressed by Trump a month ago. The US president stated that he would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank territory, a measure that would end in fact with the two-state solution.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said in a statement released shortly after the Knesset vote that “the occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, constitute a single geographic unit over which Israel has no sovereignty, and that sovereignty belongs exclusively to the Palestinian people“.

The letter also demanded that all countries and United Nations institutions reject this decision and take “the necessary deterrent measures” to prevent the Israeli authorities from implementing their plans and “systematic policies to seize Palestinian land by force or under any pretext of annexation.” Hamas has called the plan “null and illegitimate.”

In recent days, the Palestinian Government has reported more than a hundred attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian olive grove pickers throughout the occupied West Bank. Authorities have reported violent physical attacks, restrictions on movement, denial of access, intimidation and harassment in all its forms, including direct shootings.

In one of these episodes, around twenty settlers, some masked and armed with sticksthey beat several Palestinians – leaving an elderly woman unconscious – and burned at least two cars, after preventing the olive harvest in the town of Turmusaya.