The Cost of the United States’s Embassy in Jerusalem
- Written by Ana Teresa Badia
- Published in Opinion
- Hits: 3340
The United States’ embassy in Jerusalem will cost 20 million dollars more than what was announced by the president Donald Trump. It has been already invested 400 thousand dollars in the remodeling of the consular building which already existed in the thousand-year-old Israeli city.
This first transformation allowed the Government of Washington to open the building as a new embassy in spite of the protests of tens of countries due to the impact that this could represent in the peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis.
The State Department gave to know new estimations in the last hours, according to which, the transfer of the United States’ embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem will cost more than 20 million dollars and not the approximately 250 thousand that indicated the president Trump some weeks ago.
“We are going to build it very fast and in a very economic way”, he had announced later, in the last March, during a meeting together with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House.
In accordance with the new documentation, an enterprise in Maryland (Desbuild Limak D & K) obtained the contract to design and build the remodeling related to the security of the building in the heart of the Sacred City. So far, the Government already invested 400 thousand dollars in the modification of the consular building which already existed in the city, which allowed them to open as a new embassy, decision that generated the almost unanimous condemn of the international community, because of it meant to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
The 21,2 millions of dollars announced by the State Department will be aimed to what was denominated by the State Department as the second phase of the building, the channels ABC News y CNN informed today. The President Trump announced in the last December the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the transfer of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to that city.
This announcement provoked Palestinians’ protests in their autonomous territories, causing a total of 60 dead and tens injured. Trump had promised the transfer of the embassy to Jerusalem during his electoral campaign in 2016, a measure that few persons saw as feasible and with which the magnate appealed to the vote of Evangelicals and Jews.
At that moment, political observers warned that the implications of Trump’s decision were risky due to the unease that this would generate among his Arab and even European partners, giving an additional blow to the stagnant scenario of the peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. / Radio Rebelde