• VP Vance terms move ‘very stupid political stunt’
• Pakistan, 14 other nations slam Tel Aviv’s designs on West Bank
• US president expects Riyadh to join Abraham Accords by year-end

WASHINGTON/ISLAM­ABAD: US President Donald Trump warned Israel that it would lose backing from Washington if it annexes the occupied West Bank.

Trump’s comments, published in an interview by Time Magazine, came as both Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned Tel Aviv against any annexation.

“It won’t happen. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. And you can’t do that now. We’ve had great Arab support,” Trump said when asked what the consequences would be for Israel if it did annex the Palestinian territory.

“Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”

Trump also told Time he believed Saudi Arabia would join the Abraham Accords, which would normalise relations between Israel and Arab states, by the end of the year.

“Yes, I do. I do,” he said when asked if he thought Riyadh would join in that time frame.

“See they had a problem. They had a Gaza problem and they had an Iran problem. Now they don’t have those two problems,” he said, referring to Israel’s war in Gaza and Iran’s nuclear programme, which US airstrikes targeted earlier this year.

Trump then said that he would be “making a decision” on whether Israel should release high-profile Palestinian prisoner Marwan Barghouti as part of peace moves.

Barghouti — who hails from the Fatah movement — was among the Palestinian prisoners whose release was sought as part of the Gaza deal, according to Egyptian state-linked media.

Trump has dispatched a stream of top officials to Israel in recent days to shore up the fragile Gaza ceasefire he brokered earlier this month.

‘Very stupid political stunt’

But as Vance wrapped up his three-day visit and Rubio arrived, Israeli lawmakers advanced two bills paving the way for West Bank annexation.

The vote in the Israeli parliament on Wednesday was the first of four needed to pass the law.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party did not support the legislation, which was put forth by lawmakers outside his ruling coalition and passed by a vote of 25-24 out of 120 lawmakers.

A second bill by an opposition party proposing the annexation of the Maale Adumim settlement passed by 31-9.

Taking exception, the US VP called it a “very stupid political stunt and I personally take some insult to it.”

Vance spoke after Rubio warned that steps toward annexing the territory, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, could endanger Trump’s plan to end the Gaza war, which has yielded a shaky ceasefire so far.

“The West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel. The policy of President Trump is that the West Bank will not be annexed. This will always be our policy,” said Vance.

Joint condemnation

Pakistan, in a joint statement with 14 other nations, condemned Tel Aviv’s attempt to impose “Israeli sovereignty” over the occupied West Bank, after the Israeli parliament passed bills on annexing the West Bank, the Foreign Office said, according to Dawn.com.

In a statement issued on Thur­sday, the FO condemned “in stro­ngest terms the approval of the Israeli Knesset of two draft laws aiming to impose a so-called ‘Israeli sovereignty’ over the occupied West Bank”, calling it a “blatant” violation of international law.

The joint statement was signed by 14 countries, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and Turkiye.

The FO noted that the move violated the “United Nations Security Council resolutions, particularly Resolution 2334, which condemns all Israeli measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character, and status of the occupied Palestinian territory since 1967, including East Jerusalem”.

The statement also welcomed the “Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice of 22 October 2025 on Israel’s Obli­gations in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.

It noted that the Israeli move to annex the West Bank went against the “advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice”.

With input from Agencies

Published in Dawn, October 24th, 2025