JERUSALEM (JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office denied a reporter’s tweet asserting that the Israeli leader asked President Donald Trump not to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
“The claims posted by a Fox News correspondent are false,” read the statement Monday from the Prime Minister’s Office, which went on to quote from summaries by then-acting National Security Adviser Yaakov Nagel of Netanyahu’s meetings with Trump at the White House on Feb. 17 in which he supported the move.
Earlier in the day, Conor Powell posted on Twitter, “Everyone I’ve spoken to in DC that has been briefed on #Jerusalem embassy move says #Netanyahu told #Trump not to move embassy at this time.”
The same day, during a Likud party meeting, Netanyahu again expressed his support for moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv.
“My consistent and unequivocal position is that the U.S. Embassy should move to Jerusalem, as should other embassies,” Netanyahu said at the meeting.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Trump is weighing how moving the embassy to Jerusalem — a pledge the Republican made during the his election campaign — would affect the peace process.
“The president, I think rightly, has taken a very deliberative approach to understanding the issue itself, listening to input from all the interested parties in the region and understanding what such a move in the context of a peace initiative, what impact would such a move have,” Tillerson said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
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