Abbas in Egypt to coordinate stance ahead of Trump meet

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was set to meet with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi later on Saturday to coordinate positions on the peace process ahead of his first meeting with US President Donald Trump in Washington next week.

According to Palestinian and Israeli news websites, Abbas and Sissi will also discuss the PA’s deteriorating relations with Hamas terror group in the Gaza Strip.

Abbas will visit the White House on May 3 for a series of high-level meetings with the president and other senior administration officials on finding a way to try to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Trump has made Middle East peacemaking a priority, meeting at the White House in February with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and earlier this month with Sissi and King Abdullah of Jordan.

The US president is expected to make his first visit to Israel at the end of May.

His envoy to the region, Jason Greenblatt, has made two trips to the region since Trump assumed the presidency in January in an effort to jumpstart the long-dormant negotiations.

Abbas’s talks with Sissi are also expected to focus on the situation in the Gaza Strip where Abbas has announced the Palestinian Authority will no longer pay for the gas that fuels the coastal enclave’s power generators. He has also threatened to cut off payments to PA workers in the Strip.

The move is part of an attempt by Abbas to take back control over Gaza from the Hamas terrorist group that ousted his forces in a violent uprising 10 years ago.

Cairo has recently improved its ties with Hamas after a long period of tension due to Hamas’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Cairo also controls one of the crossings into Gaza and participates in Israel’s blockade.

Ties between Abbas and Sissi were also said to be tense over Cairo’s perceived support for an Abbas rival, Mohammad Dahlan.

Trump spoke to Abbas for the first time over the phone in March, when he invited him to the White House.

In December, the Trump transition team refused to meet with Palestinian officials visiting Washington, putting them off until after the January 20 inauguration, according to Saeb Erekat, the main point man for official contacts with the US. Other advisers say Abbas tried to arrange a phone call with Trump after the November election and again after the inauguration, but received no response to his requests. The White House did not respond to a January letter in which Abbas expressed concerns about the possibility of the US moving its embassy in Israel to contested Jerusalem.

But after meeting with Greenblatt in Ramallah in March, Abbas said he believed a “historic” peace deal with Israel was possible with Trump in office.

Greenblatt told Arab foreign ministers a week later that Trump was committed to reaching a deal between Israel and the Palestinians that would “reverberate” throughout the Middle East and the world.

In an interview published last week by the Japanese news site Asahi Shimbun, Abbas expressed willingness to meet Netanyahu in Washington under the auspices of the Trump administration.

“I am ready to meet the prime minister of Israel anytime in Washington under the patronage of President Trump,” he said.

After Trump’s planned first visit to the region in late May, he will reportedly be followed by his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley, US ambassador to the United Nations. The latter is reportedly set to come in June.