Bill Clinton: “I offered Palestine all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank, but they never wanted a homeland. They only wanted to kill the Jews.”

Former US President Bill Clinton spoke again about the failure of peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians during the Camp David Summit in 2000, and made a harsh statement about the intentions of the Palestinian leadership at the time. In a recent interview, Clinton stated that he offered Yasser Arafat "the entire Gaza Strip and 97% of the West Bank," in addition to a creative solution for the status of Jerusalem, but that the proposal was rejected. According to the former president, the reason was not the insufficiency of the offer, but the very nature of the Palestinian project: “They never really wanted a homeland for themselves. They only wanted to kill the Jews.” The statement reignited the debate about the reasons for the collapse of peace negotiations in the early 2000s. Clinton, who personally mediated the talks between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, has repeatedly stated over the years that Palestinian refusal was the main cause of the failure. 

• Clinton's offer at Camp David included: 
• 97% of the West Bank
• 100% of the Gaza Strip
• Territory exchange equivalent to the remaining 3%
• A special formula for East Jerusalem

Despite this, Arafat rejected the agreement without presenting a counter-proposal and, months later, the Second Intifada erupted, with a wave of suicide bombings that killed more than a thousand Israelis. Clinton's statement gains even more weight in the current context of war between Israel and Hamas, reinforcing the narrative that part of the Palestinian leadership never accepted the existence of of a Jewish state. So far, neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas have commented on the former US president's new statements.

pic.twitter.com/mP99yTbq7i — Ten_Code (@Ten__Code) May 26, 2026