Saudi crown prince to host PA’s Abbas next week — Palestinian officials tell ToI

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will travel to Saudi Arabia on Sunday to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, two senior Palestinian officials tell The Times of Israel.

Riyadh has intensified its engagement with the Palestinians over the past two years amid negotiations with the Biden administration about the kingdom signing a normalization deal with Israel.

Saudi Arabia has conditioned its agreement on Israel establishing a pathway to a future Palestinian state — a nonstarter for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, particularly as the war in Gaza sparked by the Hamas terror group’s October 7 attack drags on.

With a normalization agreement effectively off the table until at least the US presidential election, Abbas and bin Salman will try and calibrate their approaches to Washington, preparing for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump to enter the White House in January, one of the Palestinian officials says.

Abbas’s visit will come less than a week after the assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, and the two leaders will discuss its impact on the ongoing war in Gaza, according to both Palestinian officials.

The PA has long aimed to restore Saudi financial assistance, which dried up in 2016.

Ramallah has made progress toward that end and hopes that next week’s meeting will move Riyadh further in that direction, according to one of the Palestinian officials.

Abbas last met with bin Salman in Riyadh two months ago.