Aides to US President expect him to release his Israel-PA peace plan once Netanyahu forms a government coalition.
Aides to US President Donald Trump expect the president to release his peace plan for Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) once Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu forms a coalition, Reuters reported on Wednesday, a day after Netanyahu’s election victory.
Officials said that despite criticism of the administration’s moves to date, the plan will demand compromises from both sides.
The contents of the Middle East peace plan, authored by President Donald Trump’s advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, have remained a secret thus far.
Kushner and Greenblatt have limited the plan’s distribution over the two years they have been crafting it. It has been kept secret “to ensure people approach it with an open mind” when it is released, a senior administration official told Reuters.
Only four people have regular access - Kushner, Greenblatt, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and Kushner aide Avi Berkowitz, the official said.
Trump is briefed regularly on the contents but is not believed to have read the entire document of dozens of pages.
“He is briefed if something interesting is happening or there is an idea they want to run by him,” the official told Reuters.
While the plan has not yet been made public, Kushner recently discussed it in an interview with Sky News in Arabic.
According to Reuters, the proposal also addresses such core political issues as the status of Jerusalem, and separately aims at helping the Palestinian Arabs strengthen their economy.
Cloaked in secrecy is whether the plan will propose outright the creation of a Palestinian state.
On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the plan would be presented before too long but, when asked, declined to say whether the administration favored a two-state solution.
The PA, meanwhile, has been boycotting the US ever since Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December of 2017 and has rejected the US peace plan before it has even been unveiled.