After furious US criticism, PM’s office calls annexation bills ‘political provocation’ that are ‘unlikely to go anywhere’

After biting criticism from US Vice President JD Vance of yesterday’s preliminary Knesset votes to annex parts of the West Bank, and the publication of a Time magazine interview in which US President Donald Trump said Israel would lose “all support” from the US if it annexed the territory, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office says the vote “was a deliberate political provocation by the opposition to sow discord during Vance’s visit to Israel.”

“The two bills were sponsored by opposition members of the Knesset,” the PMO says in a statement sent out in English.

“The Likud party and the religious parties (the principal coalition members) did not vote for these bills, except for one disgruntled Likud member who was recently fired from the chairmanship of a Knesset committee,” the statement says, referring to Yuli Edelstein. “Without Likud support these bills are unlikely to go anywhere.”

In fact, Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism, which are members of the coalition, did support the bill.

The broader of the two bills was sponsored by far-right MK Avi Maoz of the one-man Noam party — which was part of the coalition until it left earlier this year. The bill would require Israel to “apply its laws and sovereignty to the areas of settlement in Judea and Samaria to establish the status of these areas as an inseparable part of the sovereign State of Israel.”