Seemingly putting the kibosh on the Israeli right’s dream of applying sovereignty to parts of the West Bank, US President Donald Trump has said Israel would lose “all support” from the United States if it tried to move ahead with annexation.

The comments published Thursday by Time magazine were made by Trump during an October 15 interview, prior to the Knesset’s passage on Wednesday — in a preliminary reading and against the prime minister’s wishes — of a bill that would apply Israeli sovereignty to all West Bank settlements. Underlining the administration’s lack of patience for such efforts, Trump’s deputy JD Vance said Thursday as he departed Israel that the previous day’s vote had offended him and was “very stupid.”

“It won’t happen. It won’t happen,” Trump told Time, referring to annexation. “It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. And you can’t do that now. We’ve had great Arab support. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. It will not happen. Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”

Trump had already ruled out the idea last month, saying, “I’m not allowing Israel to annex the West Bank. There’s been enough. It’s time to stop now.” But the comments published Thursday were his most stern warning yet that he would not tolerate the move.

Also in the Time interview, Trump said he’d made Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stop the war in Gaza, and that it might have continued “for years” otherwise. He also said he believed Israel and Saudi Arabia would normalize ties by the end of the year.

“They had a Gaza problem and they had an Iran problem. Now they don’t have those two problems,” he said of Saudi Arabia. He did not offer any further details on how this would be achieved, given Riyadh’s insistence that normalization was directly tied to Palestinian statehood, a nonstarter for Israel.

A ‘weird’ vote

The two bills passed by the Knesset on Wednesday — one that would annex all West Bank settlements and another, more limited one that would annex one major city-settlement, Maale Adumin — were presented by right-wing opposition figures, amid opposition from Netanyahu and most of his Likud party. They passed due to support from Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners and the abstention of most Likud MKs, who were loath to actively vote against a bill popular with their base.

The legislation now goes to committee for deliberations and revisions, and must pass three more votes in the Knesset to become law — a highly unlikely eventuality given Trump’s unequivocal veto.

Speaking at Ben Gurion Airport before taking off on Thursday at the end of a warm two-day visit, Vice President Vance struck a decidedly sour note, calling the Knesset vote “weird” and adding that he was “sort of confused by that.”

Vance said he was told it was a “political stunt” and “purely symbolic,” but that it was a “very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it.”

“The West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel,” he said. “That will continue to be our policy, and if people want to take symbolic votes they can do that, but we certainly weren’t happy about it.”

Though the statement quickly dominated headlines in Israel, it did not appear to be a central message Vance was looking to convey at the end of his trip, and he made in response to a question on the matter after already concluding a short press conference.

Previous visits to Israel by American vice presidents have also been marred by West Bank developments that Netanyahu failed to control. In 2010, the Interior Ministry approved the construction of 1,600 new apartments in East Jerusalem during a visit by then-vice president Joe Biden that had been quite friendly, angering the US administration at the time.

Vance wasn’t the first senior US official to publicly criticize the vote. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday night that the Knesset’s move toward annexing the West Bank could threaten Trump’s plan to end the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza.