Hanegbi: We’ll wait for Trump peace plan before taking any sovereignty steps

Veteran Likud minister Tzachi Hanegbi tells Israel Radio that Likud wants to apply Israeli sovereignty to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, but won’t take unilateral action until after the unveiling of the Trump peace plan.

“We have no interest in annexing three million Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria and turning them into citizens of Israel and changing the makeup of the Jewish and democratic state,” says Hanegbi, a confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, using the biblical term for the West Bank.

“We need to find, in the end, a solution to the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Ma’ale Adumim, Ma’ale Efraim, in the Etzion Bloc… who don’t know what their status is. Are they Israeli or not? And therefore, this issue we want to resolve, it doesn’t come at the expense of anyone.”

But Hanegbi says such a step is not imminent.

“Of course it clashes [with the Trump peace plan] and therefore… we won’t be running to make decisions of this kind in the coming weeks.”

Hanegbi says he doesn’t know what the US peace plan contains, adding “certainly there is no point in taking unilateral steps before we hear what the president’s plan is.”

In the interview, Hanegbi also says he hopes Bennett and Shaked’s New Right crosses the electoral threshold.