U.S. President Barack Obama in an interview aired on Israeli television on Tuesday said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu policy backing settlements in occupied Palestinian territory is making a future Palestinian state impossible.
“Bibi says that he believes in the two-state solution and yet his actions consistently have shown that if he is getting pressured to approve more settlements he will do so regardless of what he says about the importance of the two-state solution” Obama said referring to Netanyahu by his nickname.
Obama pointed out that in the past few years both he and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had “countless times” personally appealed to Netanyahu to stop settlement activity but that those pleas were ignored.
“Increasingly what you are seeing is that the facts on the ground are making it almost impossible at least very difficult and if this trendline continues – impossible to create a contiguous functioning Palestinian state” Obama said during the interview.
Obama’s statements came few weeks after Washington did not exercise its veto to stop a U.N. Security Council resolution that demands an end to Israeli settlement building.
