From the Liveblog of
Thursday, August 22, 2024
Abbas set to visit Saudi Arabia and Egypt over next two weeks as he seeks support for trip to Gaza
Gianluca Pacchiani is the Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will head to Saudi Arabia on an official visit next week, and then to Egypt, the Qatari-owned Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reports. The visits are confirmed to The Times of Israel by a source in Abbas’s party Fatah.
In Riyadh, Abbas is set to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday. The paper notes that the visit has already been postponed twice, and its official purpose is to discuss ways to halt the war.
The meeting does not involve a request for financial aid from the PA, it adds. Saudi officials indicated before October 7 that direct financial support to Ramallah, which was halted in 2021, would resume if the PA greenlights the kingdom’s normalization with Israel and increases efforts to curb corruption.
Abbas’s visit to Riyadh was initially supposed to take place earlier this month but was pushed off following Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Palestinian official told The Times of Israel.
Within the next two weeks, Abbas is also scheduled to visit Egypt and meet with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. The Qatari paper says that Abbas’s visit to the Gaza Strip will be on the agenda, and he is likely to request to pass through Egypt, prior to approval of the US and Israel.
Yesterday, Abbas issued a decree appointing his aide Hussein Al-Sheikh as coordinator of a committee tasked with arranging his intended trip to the Palestinian enclave, which he first announced before the Turkish parliament last week.
Fatah was violently ousted from the enclave by the rival Hamas party in 2007. The PA is seeking to garner international support to arrange Abbas’s visit and has reportedly sent a formal request to Israel to use one of Israel’s crossings into the enclave.
