A visibly frustrated US President Donald Trump shut down a French reporter’s question about Israel’s vote to annex the West Bank.
It comes after Trump threatened to cut all US support for Israel if it follows through on a parliamentary vote in favour of a bill taking sovereignty over the occupied territory.
He told the reporter that he couldn’t ‘understand a word’ she was saying when she posed the question, before praising her ‘beautiful accent’.
The awkward exchange took place during a televised White House roundtable discussion on Thursday featuring Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The reporter asked the US president: ‘Yesterday, there was a vote at the Knesset on annexing the West Bank. Do you see that as a challenge to your peace efforts?’
Right-wing lawmakers voted on Wednesday in the Knesset to advance a bill to impose Israeli sovereignty on the occupied West Bank which the Palestinians claim as part of an envisioned independent state.
‘Could you say that louder please?’ Trump responded, before the reporter repeated the question.
An exasperated Trump then turned to Attorney General Bondi and said: ‘Will you answer that please, because I cannot understand a word she is saying.’
Before Bondi could answer, the president turned back to the reporter and asked: ‘Where are you from?’
‘I’m from France,’ she replied. ‘You’re from France,’ Trump said. ‘Beautiful accent, but we can’t understand what you’re saying.’
Bondi quickly informed Trump the question was about a vote on the West Bank in the Knesset.
‘The West Bank? Don’t worry about the West Bank. Israel is not going to do anything with the West Bank, okay?
‘Don’t worry about it. Is that your question? They’re not gonna do anything with the West Bank. Don’t worry about it. Israel’s doing very well. They’re not gonna do anything with it,’ Trump said.
In an embarrassment to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, far-right politicians voted to pass – in its preliminary reading – a bill that would apply Israeli sovereignty to all West Bank settlements.
Netanyahu criticised the move a ‘deliberate political provocation by the opposition to sow discord’.
The bill was proposed by Knesset member Avi Maoz of the far-right party Noam and passed with 25 lawmakers in support and 24 against.
Lawmakers from Religious Zionism, Otzma Yehudit, Agudat Yisrael, Yisrael Beiteinu, as well as Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, who went against the Likud party line, voted in favor of the proposal.
The Likud removed Edelstein from the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee over his vote, a source told Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The preliminary vote comes prior to the three required votes in the Knesset before the bill becomes law.
A second, more limited bill was also advanced to annex the major city-settlement of Ma’ale Adumim near Jerusalem, which has over 40,000 Israeli settlers.
That bill was put forward opposition lawmaker Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu party, and passed with 32 MKs in support and nine against.
US Vice-President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticised the move by Israel’s parliament to annex the West Bank.
At the end of his trip to Israel, Vance branded the vote ‘very stupid’ and an ‘insult’ to him personally, while Rubio warned that annexing the territory could derail Trump’s 20-point peace plan.
Speaking as he prepared to leave Israel on Thursday, Vance said: ‘If it was a political stunt, it was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it.
‘The West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel. The policy of the Trump administration is that the West Bank will not be annexed by Israel.’
He called the vote ‘symbolic’ and said it had ‘no practical significance’.
Before arriving in Israel, Rubio told reporters: ‘They passed a vote in the Knesset, but the president has made clear that’s not something we’d be supportive of right now.
‘We think there’s potential for it to be even threatening to the peace deal.’
Trump said that Israeli annexation of the West Bank ‘won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries,’ adding that Israel would ‘lose all of its support from the United States if that happened,’ in an interview for Time Magazine.
This month, marking the beginning of the olive harvest in the region, has seen at least 41 documented attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, according to Haaretz.
Testimony from villagers in the town of Turmus Ayya, near Ramallah, suggest they aren’t safe to harvest their olives freely, despite an order from the head of the Civil Administration obliging soldiers to protect Palestinian farmers.
There, Afaf Abu Alia woke up early on October 19 to join her grandchildren picking olives, when she heard a woman scream ‘settlers’.
A group of masked men appeared, one of whom hit the 55-year-old on the head with a club, according to a report in Reuters.
‘Settler violence has skyrocketed in scale and frequency,’ Ajith Sunghay, the head of the UN Human Rights Office in the Palestinian territory, said in a statement released Tuesday.
‘Two weeks into the start of the 2025 harvest, we have already seen severe attacks by armed settlers against Palestinian men, women, children and foreign solidarity activists.’
The UN said the first half of 2025 has seen 757 settler attacks causing casualties or property damage – a 13 percent increase compared with the same period last year.
