Jeddah: Senior US officials including presidential adviser Jared Kushner have met with leaders in Saudi Arabia and Qatar to discuss the peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians, the state news agencies of the two Gulf countries said late on Tuesday.
Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, US negotiator Jason Greenblatt and deputy national security adviser Dina Powell met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman in Jeddah, then flew to Doha to meet the emir of Qatar, Shaikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani.
Apart from efforts to end Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, the two sides also discussed encouraging “security, stability and Middle-Eastern-prosperity,” SPA said.
Neither of the news agencies mentioned the months-old row between Riyadh and Doha, which has defied Kuwaiti and US mediation efforts.
Mohammad and the official talked about ways to achieve “a real and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians” and stability in the wider Middle East and beyond, the Saudi state news agency SPA said.
In Doha, which hosts the political leadership of Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, Shaikh Tamim and the envoys discussed “the improvement of the humanitarian situation and living conditions in Gaza Strip,” Qatar state news agency QNA reported.
The White House announced the trip earlier this month, saying it was part of a regional tour including meetings with leaders from the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
The US delegation planned to meet regional leaders to discuss a “path to substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks”, a White House official said at the time.
Kushner was charged with helping to broker a deal between Israelis and Palestinians after Trump took office.
The president went to Saudi Arabia and Israel during his first post-inauguration trip abroad and has expressed a personal commitment to reaching a deal that has eluded his Republican and Democratic predecessors.
A senior Palestinian official has said Kushner’s trip will be a do-or-die moment in the Trump administration’s nascent Middle East peace process initiative.
Unless Trump’s team finally comes out with some public explanation of its vision, he said, the effort could be over before it really gets started.
“It’s now or never,” Husam Zomlot, who took over as the head of the PLO Washington office this spring, said.
“This is the time and this is the opportunity . . . we are hanging on this opportunity . . . we want it to succeed.”
The high-level White House delegation will visit Abbas in Ramallah on Thursday, ending their regional tour.
The PLO has laid out a public position for what it wants: specifically, that the Trump administration clearly and unequivocally endorse the two-state solution. Trump was agnostic on the issue in February and said he would favor a one or two state solution: “I like the one that both parties like.”
Greenblatt has been going back and forth to the region for months in a listening mode, but now observers want to see results.
“Now we need to hear something about where we are going,” he said. “It’s about time we hear it . . . We really expect clarity.”