The Jerusalem Municipality announced on Wednesday night that its Building and Planning Committee had approved plans for the construction of a new US Embassy to Israel. The new embassy will be built on Hebron Road in southern Jerusalem. The committee also approved a plan to extend the current temporary embassy, which is located in the capital’s Arnona neighborhood.
Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum told The Media Line, “After two years of work in coordination with the US State Department and the Office for Building Overseas of the United States, we’re thrill that the local committee has approved the plan for the new embassy on Hebron Road and for the extension of the current embassy in Arnona.”
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The municipality’s approval comes less than a week before President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration, amid reports that Israel was concerned the Biden Administration would drag its feet on the project.
US President Donald Trump ordered the embassy moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2017. The new US Embassy to Israel opened in temporary quarters, in an existing US Consulate building, on May 14, 2018, in a ceremony coinciding with Israel’s 70th independence day. The consulate building that temporarily houses the new embassy straddles the border between west Jerusalem and an area that was, from 1949 to 1967, “no-man’s land” between the Israeli- and Jordanian-ruled sectors of the then-divided city.