Palestine slammed an Israeli media report which reveals purported details of U.S. President Donald Trump's undisclosed Middle East peace plan.
"Any peace plan that does not include the creation of an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 border with east Jerusalem as its capital is doomed to fail," Nabil Abu Rudeineh, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's spokesman, said Thursday, as reported by German news service dpa.
He said attempts to find parties willing to cooperate with such plans "will face a deadlock because the only address for peace is the Palestinian leadership."
Israeli television said Wednesday that U.S. President Donald Trump's Middle East peace plan would propose a Palestinian state on as much as 90 percent of the illegally occupied West Bank, with a capital in East Jerusalem, but not including its holy sites.
The White House, which has kept details of the plan under wraps and said its release could still be months away, dismissed the report by Israel's Reshet 13 TV as "inaccurate speculation."
Jason Greenblatt, the U.S. special representative for international negotiations, tweeted in response: "While I respect @BarakRavid, his report on Israel's Ch. 13 is not accurate. Speculation about the content of the plan is not helpful. Very few people on the planet know what is in it... for now."
Citing what it said was a source briefed by the Americans, the television report said the plan would entail Israel annexing Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank while isolated settlements would either be evacuated or their construction halted.
Trump wants the proposed Israeli moves to be supplemented by territorial swaps with the Palestinians, and for East Jerusalem's walled Old City, site of major Jewish, Muslim and Christian shrines, to be under Israeli sovereignty but with the joint management of the Palestinians and Jordan, the report said. It said "most Arab neighborhoods" in East Jerusalem would be under Palestinian sovereignty as a future capital. Israel calls all of Jerusalem its "eternal and undivided capital," a status not recognized internationally. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem, including the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City, as the capital of a future state.
