President Donald Trump denied that the planned transfer of the US embassy to Israel to Jerusalem would take place within a year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, expected the transfer in the course of 2018.
Reversing decades of US policy, Trump in early December recognized Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and set in motion the process of relocating the embassy from Tel Aviv, jeopardizing Middle East peace efforts and upsetting the Arab world and the western allies.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said last month that the embassy relocation would not take place for three years, and it is quite ambitious, "a period that administration officials have attributed to the logistics of finding and placing. secure a site and arrange accommodation for diplomats.
Jerusalem is home to places sacred to Muslim, Jewish and Christian religions. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem, which Israel has occupied in the Arab-Israeli war of the 1967, unrecognized action internationally, as the capital of their future state.
Netanyahu, according to Israeli journalists who followed him on a trip to India, said today: "My assessment is that it will go much faster than you think - within a year from now."
Asked about Netanyahu's comment, Trump told Reuters in an interview
that “By the end of the year, we are talking about different scenarios - I mean of course that it would be a temporary solution.
Trump promised, however, that it would be a "nice embassy but not one that costs $ 1,2 billion," referring to what he says is the cost of the new US embassy in London.
Trump last week canceled a trip to London to open the new diplomatic mission, blaming his White House predecessor Barack Obama for selling the old "peanuts" in a bad deal.
He acknowledged that the move by the embassy to Britain was approved by former President George W. Bush, but said it was built under Obama and “came out tremendously out of budget.