Shortly after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced a "solid assessment" that the U.S. would relocate its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem "within a year," U.S. President Donald Trump disputed Netanyahu's assertion.
On Dec. 6, reversing decades of U.S. policy, Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and set in motion the process of moving the embassy from Tel Aviv.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson predicted last month that the embassy move would probably occur "no earlier than three years out, and that's pretty ambitious," a time frame that administration officials have attributed to the logistics of finding and securing a site as well as arranging housing for diplomats.
According to Israeli reporters traveling with Netanyahu in India, the Israeli prime minister assessed Wednesday that the relocation would happen "much faster than we think. Within a year."
Asked about Netanyahu's comment, Trump told Reuters in an interview that was not the case. "By the end of the year? We're talking about different scenarios – I mean obviously that would be on a temporary basis. We're not really looking at that. That's no."
On Thursday, Netanyahu took a step back from his initial comments when an official at his office explained that the prime minister recognized that the construction of a new embassy will take years. The official explained that Netanyahu believes Washington is considering "interim measures that could result in an embassy opening much faster."
The official, who declined to be named, did not define those steps or mention any dates for a Jerusalem embassy to begin operating. In the past, Israeli media speculated that, before a building is ready, the U.S. ambassador would operate part of the time out of a temporary location in Jerusalem.
Trump – whose decision on the embassy move followed a campaign pledge – promised that it would be "a beautiful embassy but not one that costs $1.2 billion," referring to what he says was the cost of the new U.S. embassy in London.
