A planned meeting in Saudi Arabia of Arab leaders in response to United States President Donald Trump's plan to take control of Gaza has been postponed by a day and expanded, Arab diplomats said on Monday, February 17. "The mini Arab summit in Riyadh has been postponed from Thursday to Friday, February 21," a Saudi source told French news agency AFP. An Arab diplomatic source confirmed the new date.
Three Arab states had been expected to attend the summit, but the Saudi source said the expanded meeting will "include the leaders of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries, along with Egypt and Jordan, to discuss Arab alternatives to Trump's plans in the Gaza Strip".
The member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council are the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait.
The Saudi source said that "an influential Gulf country expressed its dissatisfaction at being excluded from the Riyadh summit, which prompted the organizers to include all the Gulf countries" – without specifying which country.
Trump has proposed taking over the Gaza Strip and moving its more than 2 million residents to Jordan or Egypt, a plan experts say would violate international law. Arab countries have unanimously rejected the idea or any prospect of displacing Palestinians from their lands.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that Washington was open to proposals from Arab countries concerning the Palestinian territory, where a fragile ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war came into effect on 19 January, after more than 15 months of fighting.
Rubio said he hoped to be able to discuss these ideas during a tour that took him to Israel on Sunday, Saudi Arabia on Monday, and on to the UAE.
On Tuesday, Jordan's King Abdullah II met with Trump at the White House and "reiterated Jordan's steadfast position against the displacement of Palestinians," according to a statement, saying this was "the unified Arab position". Trump had doubled down on his plan during the meeting.
But asked about the existence of an Arab counter-proposal for the reconstruction of the Palestinian enclave, Yousef Al-Otaiba, the influential United Arab Emirates (UAE) ambassador to Washington, expressed doubts. "I don't see an alternative to what's being proposed. I really don't. So if someone has one, we're happy to discuss it, we're happy to explore it, but it hasn't surfaced yet," the diplomat said during the World Government Summit in Dubai on Wednesday.