In the coming month, US President Donald Trump will announce a new Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative aimed at securing a series of deals ahead of a final status arrangement, the pan-Arabic daily al-Hayat reported on Wednesday.

US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner told opposition leader Isaac Herzog Tuesday that Washington intended to move fast to advance a renewal of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, a spokesman for Herzog said, with Trump’s envoy Jason Greenblatt reportedly set to return next week so as not to leave a “diplomatic vacuum.”

“Trump’s regional approach to “peace” and stability and the new regional order, aims to ensure the normalcy of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours, especially the wealthy ones,” writes Alaa Tartir. “Such regional approach will further empower the Israeli position in any final-status negotiations with the Palestinians, and will create further distortions in the mere idea of peace.”

“Netanyahu’s bullying, bluster and hasbara cannot change the empirical facts: Jerusalem is more binational, more contested and more divided than at any point since 1967,” writes Daniel Seidemann.

“Trump has left Israelis and Palestinians with no tangible framework for negotiations, and no guiding principles to frame the negotiations,” writes Nathan Guttman.

“If the P.A. did not exist, Palestinian civil society and the business sector would have to invent it. So would Israel’s defense establishment, which dreads the prospect of having to reimpose naked military rule. That makes any new round of peace negotiations—despite Abbas’s wobbly prestige or Trump’s uncertain impulses—irresistible,” writes Bernard Avishai.

Even though it remained unclear what, if anything, the Saudi monarch had actually agreed to and whether Israel would make an offer acceptable to Arab states, Mr. Trump has used his entire trip so far to signal that he sees the Saudis as central.

Many evangelicals may have wanted the president to do something more dramatic like announce an embassy move, said Todd Deatherage, who founded the Telos Group, which takes evangelicals on trips to the Middle East. But for those who voted for Trump, Deatherage said, he gave them enough to make them feel like this is what a presidential visit to the Middle East should look like.

As some 1,300 Palestinian prisoners entered their 37th day of mass hunger strike, with dozens of prisoners transferred to civilian hospitals due to their critical health conditions, the Israeli government has continued to refuse to negotiate with leaders of the hunger strike.

Two cars were set on fire and the words ‘price tag’ spray painted on a house in ‘Ara, a Palestinian village in northern Israel.

In a highly unusual move, Israeli police on Wednesday arrested three guards from the Islamic Waqf, a Jordan-based organization that administers the Temple Mount, saying they tried to attack visitors to the Jerusalem site. Some 15 Jewish activists were also detained by police after they prostrated themselves in the Temple Mount compound, defying restrictions against Jewish acts of worship at the holy site.

The event has been tense in the past, with marchers chanting anti-Arab slogans. The 2015 and 2016 marches were relatively calm.

Netanyahu indicated that Israel would never allow the capital to return to its pre-1967 status, saying: “The black cloud over Jerusalem disappeared 50 years ago.”

Israel doesn’t need permission from Washington to build new homes in West Bank settlements, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said Wednesday, adding that plans for several thousand new units could be advanced next month.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett said Wednesday that he would urge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to approve more construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank so that Israel can consolidate its hold on the land.

The latest economic reports from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics indicate a rise of prices, which may lead to inflation.