Palestinians burned pictures of US President Donald Trump in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on Tuesday night, as anger ramped up over an expected announcement by Trump Wednesday of US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Israeli troops girded for the possibility of violence.
The picture-burning protest came hours after Trump told the leaders of the Palestinian Authority and Jordan in phone calls that he intends to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, despite intense Arab and Muslim opposition to a move that would alter decades of US policy and risk potentially violent protests.
Trump is to publicly address the question of Jerusalem on Wednesday and US officials familiar with his planning said he would declare Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, though he would not order the embassy move immediately.
Palestinian factions have called for protests against the moves, which would de facto recognize Israeli sovereignty over the city despite Palestinian claims to part of it.
Israeli security services were preparing for the possibility of violence in the West Bank in light of Palestinian terrorist groups calling for demonstrations in response to US Trump’s expected moves, sources said.
There were no immediate reports of large troop call-ups or significant reinforcements to West Bank units.
Intelligence minister Yisrael Katz warned Tuesday that “violent protests would be a big mistake for the PA.”
“I suggest they don’t create security tensions and don’t lead down this road. We are ready for every possibility,” he said, according to the Ynet news website.
In a statement earlier Tuesday, Hamas called for Palestinians to “make a day of rage against the occupation, rejecting moving the American embassy to Jerusalem and declaring it the capital of the Zionist entity.”
Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh warned that a US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem and recognize the city as Israel’s capital would be a “dangerous escalation” that crosses “every red line.”
Political factions led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement also called for daily protest marches this week, starting Wednesday, and Fatah’s youth wing said “all options [are] open for defending Jerusalem.”
The US State Department on Tuesday ordered government employees to avoid Jerusalem’s Old City and the West Bank until further notice in anticipation of an outbreak of Palestinian violence over Trump’s upcoming announcements on Jerusalem.
Jerusalem’s Old City includes the holiest ground in Judaism. It is also home to Islam’s third-holiest shrine and major Christian sites, and forms the combustible center of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Any perceived harm to Muslim claims to the city has triggered volatile protests in the past, both in the Holy Land and across the Muslim world.
Within the Trump administration, officials on Tuesday were still debating the particulars of the president’s expected speech as they fielded a flood of warnings from allied governments.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his aides have been “active partners” working in “total coordination” with US President Donald Trump and his administration in the lead-up to the president’s anticipated speech Wednesday recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and declaring his intended relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Israel’s Hadashot TV said Tuesday evening.
Trump’s phone call to Netanyahu on Tuesday updating him on his scheduled Wednesday speech was not their first recent conversation on the highly sensitive subject, Hadashot news reported. Netanyahu’s team has been “encouraging, supporting, [and] reassuring” the Trump team over the likely fallout, the TV report said, “and this total coordination came while the Palestinians knew nothing about this move” until very recently. “They’d heard nothing about it.”
Channel 10, meanwhile, said Netanyahu and Israel’s Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer have been privy to the details of what Trump is planning, and had played a key role.
Trump “accepted the Israeli argument that said, Let’s separate the issue of Jerusalem recognition from the peace process. Prime Minister Netanyahu and Ambassador Dermer succeeded in convincing President Trump that this is a case of righting a historical wrong,” Channel 10 reported. (In fact, candidate Trump, while on the presidential campaign trail, pledged to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.)
In response to a threat by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to consider severing ties with Israel over Trump’s expected recognition, Israel’s Minister of Intelligence Yisrael Katz declared earlier Tuesday: “There is no more historically justified and correct step now than recognizing Jerusalem, which has been the capital of the Jewish people for the past 3,000 years, as the capital of Israel.”
Overall, however, the TV reports said Netanyahu has asked his ministers not to speak out on the issue ahead of the Trump speech on Wednesday. And the Channel 10 report said Trump specifically asked Netanyahu to “keep a low profile” and see to it that Israel’s ministers do not demonstrably “rejoice” over the move, for fear of exacerbating a highly tense situation.
Netanyahu did not make any public comments on the issue on Tuesday.
Israeli TV reports have for days been predicting that Trump would make a declaration recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announce he intends to move the embassy. Despite ongoing Arab and international efforts to persuade Trump to change his mind ahead of his Wednesday speech, Hadashot news on Tuesday evening asserted definitively that “it’s done.”
US officials said Tuesday they expected Trump would make a generic statement about Jerusalem’s status as the “capital of Israel.” They said they did not expect the president to use the phrase “undivided capital,” which would imply Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem, which is not recognized by the United Nations.
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