The Riyadh summit represented, according to analysts, an opportunity for its participants to set their expectations for the future administration of US President-elect Donald Trump.
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During his first mandate, the latter had multiplied gestures in favor of Israel, in particular by transferring the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but also contributed to the normalization of its links with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, the Morocco and Sudan, via the Abraham Accords. Until then, among the 22 countries of the Arab League, only Egypt and Jordan maintained formal relations with Israel.
But Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is hostile to the two-state solution, Israeli and Palestinian living side by side in peace and security, to resolve the decades-old conflict, desired by most of the international community.
Wanting to establish a Palestinian state is not “today” a “realistic” project, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Monday. “A Palestinian state (…) will be a Hamas state,” he said.
“Crime of genocide”
Summit participants also “strongly condemned” the actions of the Israeli army, described as “a crime of genocide (…) particularly in the north of the Gaza Strip in recent weeks”, where the army Israeli has been waging a deadly offensive since October 6.
They called on the international community to “prohibit the export or transfer of arms and ammunition to Israel” and condemned “the continued attacks by the Israeli authorities (…) against the UN”.
The war in Gaza was triggered by the unprecedented Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, 2023 which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
The retaliatory offensive led by Israel, which has vowed to wipe out the Palestinian Islamist movement, has left more than 43,600 dead, according to data from the Hamas Health Ministry, deemed reliable by the UN, plunging the small besieged territory in a humanitarian disaster.
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The head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, warned of the “high probability of famine” in the north of the Gaza Strip, speaking out against “the use of hunger as a weapon of war”.
Since September 23, Israel has also been waging an open war in neighboring Lebanon against Hezbollah, which had opened a front against it in support of its Palestinian ally at the start of the war in Gaza.
Israeli strikes on Monday evening killed at least seven people, “mostly women and children”, in Saksakieh, in southern Lebanon, and at least eight others in a village in the north, targeted by a rare raid of such magnitude. distance from the border with Israel, the Health Ministry said.
Iranian-Saudi warming
“The world is waiting” for the future Trump administration to “immediately” end the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, Iranian First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref declared in Riyadh.
He described the assassinations of the leaders of Palestinian Hamas in July in Tehran and of Lebanese Hezbollah at the end of September near Beirut as “organized terrorism” on the part of Israel.
Earlier, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman said Israel should “refrain from attacking” Iran, amid exchanges of strikes and threats between the two countries.
Tensions in the Middle East: Saudi crown prince defends Iran’s sovereignty against Israel
The Saudi crown prince called Iran a “sister republic”, a sign of warming between the two regional rival powers, which ended a seven-year estrangement in 2023.
This warming “creates a very different regional environment” from that of Donald Trump’s first term, believes HA Hellyer, international security specialist at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
“Long-term war”
Israel’s sworn enemy, Iran supports Hezbollah, Hamas and the Yemeni Houthi rebels. Riyadh is trying to extricate itself from the conflict in Yemen after supporting the government against the Houthis, but considers Hezbollah a “terrorist organization”.
The Houthis claimed responsibility for a new attack on Monday against a military base in Israel, with the army confirming they had intercepted a missile coming from Yemen.
Hezbollah, which claims daily fire on northern Israel, said it was “ready for a long war”.
After Mr. Saar reported “certain progress” towards a ceasefire in Lebanon, conditional on the neutralization of Hezbollah, his Defense colleague, Israel Katz, ruled it out without “capitulation” of the Lebanese Islamist movement.
In the Gaza Strip, Civil Defense reported five Palestinians killed in Israeli airstrikes in Nusseirat (center) and Jabalia (north).
