- Rubio says it may trigger new strikes, could harden conflict lines.
- Avoids comment on Israeli annexation plans, calls them not final.
- US Secretary of State makes these remarks during Ecuador visit.
The United States has told other countries that recognition of a Palestinian state will cause more problems, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday.
“We told all these countries, we told them all, we said if you guys do this recognition stuff, it’s all fake, it’s not even real, if you do it, you’re going to create problems,” Rubio said from Quito, where he met with President Daniel Noboa and his Ecuadorean counterpart.
“There’s going to be a response, it’s going to make it harder to get a ceasefire, and it may even trigger these sorts of actions that you’ve seen, or at least these attempts at these actions,” Rubio said, adding he would not opine on Israeli discussion of annexation of the West Bank but that it was not final.
“What I am going to tell you is it was wholly predictable,” he said.
“We told all these countries before they went out, and they did this… there wasn’t going to be a Palestinian state, because that’s not the way a Palestinian state is going to happen, because they have a press conference somewhere.
He also repeated his charge that the push to elevate the Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, emboldened rival Hamas in Gaza.
“The minute — the day — that the French announced the thing they did, that day, Hamas walked away from the negotiating table,” Rubio said.
French President Emmanuel Macron has called a UN summit for September 22, where he will recognise a Palestinian state, voicing exasperation at the dire humanitarian situation and what he sees as Israeli intransigence.
On Wednesday, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for annexation of swaths of the West Bank to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state” after countries including Belgium, Canada, and Australia joined the French push on statehood.
The United Arab Emirates — which took the landmark step of normalising relations with Israel in 2020 in the so-called Abraham Accords — quickly warned that annexation was a “red line” that would “severely undermine” the agreement, seen by both US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a legacy-defining achievement.
Trump has been an outspoken supporter of Israel in its relentless assault on Gaza that followed the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
