President Donald Trump says if a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority isn’t reached while he’s president, it’s not likely to happen, ever. Trump made the remark Saturday while speaking to reporters at a news conference in Osaka at the conclusion of the G20 summit in Japan.
“With me being president, if you don’t get that deal done, it will never happen,” he said. “I know [the Palestinian Authority] want to make a deal, but they want to be a little bit cute, and that’s okay,” the president said. “I fully understand where they’re coming from.”
The Palestinian Authority has been boycotting the United States and refusing to consider any proposal – publicly at any rate – since Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December 2017.
On Friday night, intelligence agents from the PA’s security police arrested a Hebron businessman who defied the government boycott and attended the U.S.-led “Peace to Prosperity” workshop hosted by Bahrain focusing on jump-starting the Palestinian Authority economy via the economic element in the Trump administration’s regional peace plan.
READ: PA Arrests Businessman Who Returned from Bahrain Conference
The president told the reporters gathered in Osaka that if the PA decided to come to the negotiating table and make a deal, the U.S. would again fund the entity on “a humanitarian basis.”
The U.S. withdrew its funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which funnels fiscal support to the PA, in addition to other types of funding, due to its continued state incitement to murder Israelis, and payments of salaries to terrorists imprisoned in Israel and their families, and the families of those killed while trying to murder Israelis.