Israel will lose all support from the United States if it decides to annex the West Bank, US President Donald Trump told Time Magazine in an interview published Thursday afternoon.
"Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened," he said. "It won't happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries."
Trump highlighted Arab support of the ceasefire deal, but explained that "if we didn't take [Iran] out, number one, we wouldn't have signed [the ceasefire deal], because there would have been many Arab countries that just could not have done that."
"If Iran were sitting there, powerful and a bully, it would have been impossible to make a deal like this, because you would have had this looming threat over the region."
There is peace in the Middle East, he went on, saying that he believes that Saudi Arabia will "lead the way toward the Abraham Accords."
Israel's "tactical mistake," he said, however, was striking Doha, Qatar, in early September in an attempt to assassinate Hamas’s leadership.
"I think we've reshaped [the Middle East]," Trump told Time Magazine. "The most important thing is they have to respect the President of the United States. The Middle East has to understand that.
Ceasefire deal and the future of Gaza
The ceasefire deal "stopped [Netanyahu], because he would have just kept going," Trump said, explaining that the Israel-Hamas War "would've gone on for years."
Trump said he was surprised by how focused the people of Israel were on returning the hostages, and that he thought Israel would have "sacrificed more hostages in order to keep going." But when he saw that the people wanted them home more than anything else, he said to Hamas, "No more of that. You're giving us the f**king hostages, all of them."
When asked about the possibility of Marwan Barghouti being a top candidate to lead a Palestinian state, Trump said that it is his "question of the day," and that he'll "be making a decision."
Barghouti, a high-profile Palestinian prisoner whom Hamas asked Israel to release as part of the recent hostage-prisoner exchange, was convicted of five counts of murder following his arrest in Ramallah in 2002. He is a senior West Bank Fatah member and the former chief of its Tanzim militant faction who played a key role in the Second Intifada.
Regarding Hamas's disarmament under the deal, the terror organization must disarm or be in "big trouble," Trump continued, otherwise the war may resume. "Right now, they're killing gangs, but you know, at what point do the gangs morph into political opponents?"
The Palestinians don't have a "visible" leader right now, because "every one of those leaders has been shot and killed," Trump explained, going on to note that while he finds Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), "reasonable," he is probably not an option to rule the Strip.
The "Board of Peace" that will oversee the day after in Gaza is already set up, he said. "[It] is going to be a very powerful group of people, and it's going to have a lot of power in terms of the Middle East."