PA premier warns Pompeo over settlement visit

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh slammed US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's plan to visit illegal Zionist settlements in the occupied West Bank and Syrian Golan Heights, saying it will set a "dangerous precedent".

Pompeo would become the first State Department head to visit one of Zionist settlements, which are considered illegal by most of the international community.

The visit, set for next week, is a way to "legitimise the settlements" that will create "a dangerous precedent that violates international law", Shtayyeh said on Friday, as quoted by the Palestinian state news agency WAFA.

PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi and the PLO Department of Public Diplomacy and Policy, which she heads, have also condemned Pompeo's plans in posts to Twitter.

"After overseeing a shift in US policy to full complicity in Israeli #WarCrimes, outgoing @SecPompeo will visit an illegal Israeli settlement built on stolen #Palestinian land in Al-Bireh city near Ramallah in a bid to advance his personal political plans," the department tweeted.

Hussein al-Sheikh, a member of the Palestinian Fatah movement’s central committee, tweeted on Friday that Pompeo's planned visit to settlements is a "challenge to international legitimacy".

"The visit represents a challenge to the positions of all previous American administrations, which emphasised the illegality of [Israeli] settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories," he wrote.

Pompeo's visit to occupied territories comes exactly one year after he said the US did not consider Zionist settlements on occupied Palestinian land to be illegal, putting Washington at odds with UN Security Council resolutions.

Zionist regime unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981 and aimed to annex the West Bank in July, before postponing the plan amid US-led normalisation deals with the UAE and Bahrain.