Pompeo: Peace efforts to begin ‘immediately following Israeli elections’

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the US will “work” on a peace process between Israelis and Palestinians “immediately following the Israeli elections.”

Speaking by video-conference to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Pompeo says of the Trump administration’s peace plan:

“We’ve been working on this for a long time. Mr. [Jared] Kushner has been in the lead along with Jason Greenblatt in developing our program. We’ve begun to share elements of this across the region. It won’t be a US-driven process. Ultimately, the Israelis and the Palestinians will have to come to an agreement. But we think that the foundations that we have laid and the work that we’ll do immediately following the Israeli elections will set conditions where we can have a constructive conversation.”

He adds, “this problem has troubled the region for decades and decades now. It seems to me that we’re at a point in time where there are ways that we can resolve the primary differences and encourage those two places, the Israelis and the Palestinians, to come together to resolve their differences and get a solution there that has bedeviled the world for an awfully long time.”