White House said to have finalized Middle East peace plan
2019-02-12 08:45:20
The Trump administration’s proposed Israeli-Palestinian peace plan has been completed, and the US president has been briefed on its contents, senior administration officials told Fox News on Tuesday.
A senior negotiator swi
ftly denied the report as “bad info.”
“The plan is done… [the president] is happy with the parameters of the deal,” a senior White House official is quoted as saying.
According to the report, the document is 175 to 200 pages long, and fewer than five people have access to it.
The official added that the White House is unlikely to publish the draft before Israel’s elections in April.
The official said Israel’s security would be safeguarded in the proposed deal.
“We are not going to do anything that threatens Israel’s security,” a senior administration official said.
Fox reported that Trump has been briefed numerous times on details of the plan by US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Middle East peace envoy Jason Greenblatt and senior adviser Jared Kushner.
In a tweet, Greenblatt denied that the plan had been finalized and said it did not run to 175 pages.
“While the plan is close to complete, we aren’t there yet & we’ll continue to refine it until release,” he wrote.
The report comes just days before Kushner’s appearance at a US-led conference in Poland on the Middle East, where he is expected to the discuss the White House’s peace efforts and take questions from the audience.
Kushner, who is also Trump’s son-in-law, will be accompanied in Warsaw by Greenblatt. Along with other administration officials, the two are headed to the Middle East later this month to brief diplomats in at least five countries on the economic section of the US peace proposal.
A senior US official told The Times of Israel last week that Washington did not need to balance its pro-Israel slant in order to broker a peace deal.
AFP.