MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th April, 2019) Palestine will seek a collective response from the international community if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu follows through his pledge to annex the West Bank if reelected, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Maliki told Sputnik in an interview.
On April 6, Netanyahu pledged to annex settlements in the West Bank if he secured next term at the parliamentary elections. Netanyahu's Likud party won 36 of the 120 seats in Israel's parliament, according to results of the elections, which took place on Tuesday.
"We are talking to our brothers, our friends to see how to collectively react to this. If Netanyahu wants to annex the West Bank, he has to deal with 4.5 million of Palestinian. We will have a different fight ... If the two-state solution is being eliminated and he is going to annex the West Bank, then the response should not be exclusively Palestinian, but the response should be collective response from the international community," Maliki said.
The minister noted, however, that Netanyahu's remarks about the annexation of the West Bank should be seen in the context of his attempts to win more votes in the last week's elections and looming indictment for corruption and bribery.
Maliki also added that it was hard to predict what actions Netanyahu would take in regard with the Gaza Strip and Palestine in general.
"He is a tactician, and he tries to look from the strategic point of view how to use certain actions to serve his own interest. So, for example, if he thinks that he will be indicted for these charges he might go for a war in Gaza or in the north. Nobody knows. Or maybe he will decide to accept the invitation of [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin to meet with [Palestinian] President Mahmoud Abbas," he said.
Palestine remains only partially recognized as a state and claims the territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. In 1947, the United Nations worked out a plan to put an end to the conflict, giving most of the West Bank and Gaza to Palestine. Israel occupied the territories 20 years later during the Six-Day War but claims to have withdrawn all its forces from Gaza in 2005. However, the United Nations still considers some of the Palestinian territories to be occupied by Israel.
