US President Donald Trump’s meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh on Tuesday is also set to include Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Syria’s de facto leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, Arabic media reported Sunday.
Citing an informed source who declined to be identified, Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds said the Saudi prince “looks forward to Trump’s agreement to the Saudi condition of establishing a Palestinian state.” Trump had said in February that Saudi Arabia was no longer demanding Palestinian statehood as a condition for normalizing ties with Israel, a statement that at the time drew an urgent Saudi denial.
According to the source cited by Al-Quds, Trump had acceded to bin Salman’s request to include the other Arab leaders in the meeting, which will come at the start of Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates between May 13 and 16.
Trump will not be visiting Israel, whose government accuses both Abbas and Sharaa of supporting terrorism.
The US president predicted ahead of his trip that Saudi-Israeli normalization would happen “very quickly,” but in the meantime, he has reportedly dropped normalization with Israel as a condition for progress on Saudi Arabia’s civilian nuclear program.
It had been reported Saturday that Trump would announce US recognition of Palestinian statehood, but Washington’s envoy to Israel Mike Huckabee dismissed the report as “nonsense.”
Israel-Saudi normalization seemed just around the corner before the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, that started the war in Gaza. Two Israeli ministers made unprecedented state visits to the desert kingdom in the weeks before the shock assault that sparked the war in Gaza. But the prospect of normalization faded as anti-Israel sentiment reached new heights in the Muslim world amid the war.
During his first term, Trump brokered the Abraham Accords normalization agreements between Israel, the UAE, Morocco, Sudan and Bahrain, partly in exchange for Israel backing away from a plan to annex the West Bank, the seat of the Palestinian Authority.
Trump in his first term also proposed a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would have seen a truncated Palestinian state established in parts of the West Bank, Gaza and the Negev Desert. The plan was rejected outright by both the PA and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pro-settler coalition partners.
Israel has long accused the PA of inciting violence against Jews in its school system and through stipends paid to families of Palestinian terrorists detained in Israeli prisons. Abbas ordered an end to the so-called play-to-play system in February, less than a month after Trump took office for the second time.
The meeting in Riyadh on Tuesday comes as Trump has reportedly expressed frustration over the failure to reach a ceasefire in Gaza, which has been devastated over 19 months of war. The PA had previously threatened to cut ties with Trump over a plan he announced in February to take over Gaza, oust its residents and rebuild the devastated Strip as a coastal resort.
A rival Egyptian plan for postwar Gaza would have ultimately handed the Strip over to the PA, but Netanyahu has rejected any role for the unpopular body in Gaza’s postwar governance.
Separately, Israel has maintained troop presence and carried out military strikes in southern Lebanon following the ceasefire with Hezbollah in November, and ib the Syrian side of the Golan Heights following Sharaa’s ouster in December of Syria’s Iran-backed president Bashar al-Assad. Both Lebanese President Aoun and Syria’s Sharaa have demanded that Israel withdraw from their respective countries.