Rubio: Trump still wants to push Saudi normalization, but Riyadh won’t move forward amid war in Gaza

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserts that the Trump administration is still interested in brokering a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, but “the Saudis are the ones [who] have expressed their inability to move forward on it so long as the conflict is happening in Gaza.”

Riyadh has also made clear that it won’t normalize relations with Israel absent Jerusalem agreeing to allow for the establishment of an irreversible, time-bound pathway to a future Palestinian state, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to oppose.

US President Donald Trump said while in Riyadh last week that he hopes Saudi Arabia will soon enter the Abraham Accords, but recognized that they will do it at their own time.

Asked about reports that he is planning to shutter the office of the US Security Coordinator in Jerusalem, which is responsible for boosting security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Rubio says “the only thing that’s been discussed about [this office] is whether it should be brought under the authority of the [US] ambassador” in Jerusalem.

It appeared possible that Rubio thought the question was about the Jerusalem-based Office of Palestinian Affairs, which indeed has been moved by the Trump administration so that it reports directly to the US ambassador to Israel, rather than having an independent line of communication to Washington.