Saudis deny warming up to Hamas, despite recent visit

Saudi Arabia on Thursday dismissed claims that it had changed its policy toward Hamas, despite King Salman’s meeting with a delegation of the organization’s leaders last week.

In a press conference, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told reporters that the Hamas delegation’s trip to Saudi Arabia was not an official visit, but rather a religious pilgrimage to Muslim holy sites in the kingdom.

“There was no (political) visit by Hamas to the kingdom,” al-Jubeir said at a joint press conference with his Egyptian counterpart, Sameh Shoukry.

The high-level Hamas delegation visited Riyadh last Friday and met with King Salman, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, and a host of Saudi officials.

“A group from Hamas, including (politburo chief) Khaled Mashaal… visited Mecca for umra (the lesser pilgrimage). They performed the Eid (holiday) prayers there and offered Eid greetings to the king,” al-Jubeir said.

But, he repeated, “There were no [official] meetings.”

The official Saudi Press Agency reported last Saturday on the rare Hamas visit.

Present at the meetings were Mashaal’s deputy, Moussa Abu Marzouk, and Saleh al-Arouri, the movement’s Turkey-based official who masterminded the abduction-killing of three Israeli teenagers last summer. Arab media rushed to note that it was the first such meeting in over three years.

The Hamas visit triggered press criticism in Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.

Hamas and Riyadh had a falling out when the kingdom supported the Egyptian army’s 2013 ouster of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi and its brutal crackdown on his Muslim Brotherhood movement.

The relationship between Hamas and Saudi Arabia was already rocky, due to Hamas’s alignment with Shiite Iran, which provided it with arms and money for its struggle against Israel.

More recently, however, Hamas has lost favor with Iran over the Palestinian terror group’s refusal to support embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad, a key Iranian ally. In a further affront to Tehran, Hamas has officially expressed its approval of the Saudi fight against Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen.

“Hamas’s alliance with Saudi Arabia during the war in Yemen was another slap in the face for Iran, which realized that Hamas’s political leadership prefers the Saudi axis to the Iranian one,” Raz Zimmt, an expert in Iranian politics at Tel Aviv University and the Forum for Regional Thinking told The Times of Israel Tuesday.