Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton: Trump should support annexation

Seven Republican senators called on US President Donald Trump to support Israel extending its laws to parts of the West Bank in a letter sent on Tuesday.

American recognition of Israel applying sovereignty is "critical to locking in the progress your administration has made reversing the Obama-Biden legacy, restoring the US-Israel relationship and establishing a realistic basis for peace," the letter reads.

The letter's signatories are Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Kevin Cramer, Thom Tillis, Cindy Hyde-Smith, John Barrasso and Joni Ernst.

The senators put the Trump plan on the background of former US president Barack Obama's decision not to veto UN Security Council resolution 2334 condemning settlements, "which among other things effectively declared it was illegal for Israeli Jews to build in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem and severed the Jewish State's links to many of Judaism's holiest places," they wrote.

They quoted Trump as saying the decision should have been vetoed, promising "things will be different" when he is president and that the US "cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect."

The senators commended the Trump administration for recognizing "the reality and - as a matter of America's national security interests, often the desirability - of Israel's control over some territories occupied since 1967."

They praised the US Vision for Peace, which would allow Israel to extend sovereignty to 30% of the West Bank, including all settlements and the Jordan Valley, designating the rest for a future Palestinian state, saying: "There is no alternative to this fact-based approach, and as long as opponents of Israel and of the US-Israel relationship believe otherwise, peace will not be achievable."