00:00Again, thank you, Tom. On the West Bank, it's been much in the news. We've seen legislators go and visit settlements and so on, illegal settlements, talk about settlements. We know that the Speaker of the House was shown actually a plan for annexation.
00:16Now, a group of Israeli clinicians issued a paper that said that the West Bank is actually being annexed very quietly and so on. And the settlers are targeting some villages where a lot of Palestinian Americans go because they go and they build homes and so on to basically discourage development of the West Bank.
00:35My question to you, what kind of designation do you assign to the Palestinians in the West Bank and under occupation? Are they an occupied people? What status do they have? Do they occupy, let's say, they have autonomy, partial autonomy, whatever?
00:55So can you please give us, if you have a position, on what designations the Palestinians have in the West Bank, we'd like to hear it.
01:03Well, the position that we do have is that we want to see a stable West Bank that keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration's goal to achieve peace in the region.
01:11Within the short term, we remain focused on ending the war in Gaza.
01:16And then once we have broader discussions in terms of what we may see that leads to longer peace and prosperity in the region, I'm not going to preview those here.
01:23But we have continually decried violence in the West Bank from this podium and elsewhere, no matter who commits it.
01:29And we want to see a stable West Bank that, again, keeps in line, keeps Israel secure and is in line with our ultimate goal to see a prosperous region.
01:37Now, the family of Hamis Ayyad, who, the Palestinian-American that was killed last week, have requested the State Department or the U.S. government to investigate the circumstance of his death.
01:50He died as a result of fire and smoke inhalation that was started by the settlers.
01:54Have you talked to the Israelis about this?
01:57Do you have any results?
01:58Do you trust their investigation?
02:01Well, look, I refer you to comments that spokesperson Tammy Bruce made at this podium just a few days ago.
02:06I'll also repeat here that we have no higher priority than the safety and security of the American people.
02:11Okay.
02:12Yes.
