Blinken meets with Arab officials to discuss Gaza and postwar plans

Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Arab officials Monday in Saudi Arabia about the war between Israel and Hamas and the difficult issues it has created, from humanitarian aid to hostages. Blinken plans to travel to Jordan and Israel on Tuesday.

After landing in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, shortly after dawn, Blinken met with Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, and then with foreign ministers and a top foreign policy adviser from five other Arab nations in the Persian Gulf that, along with Saudi Arabia, form the Gulf Cooperation Council. Prince Faisal was also part of that second meeting. On Monday night Blinken met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The State Department listed the cease-fire and hostage issues first in the summary it released of Blinken’s one-on-one meeting with the prince. The two “discussed ongoing efforts to reach an immediate cease-fire in Gaza that would secure the release of hostages held by Hamas,” the department said.

The two diplomats also talked about greater regional integration and “a pathway to a Palestinian state with security guarantees for Israel,” the summary said. That was a reference to negotiations over a broad deal that would involve the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Palestinian representatives agreeing to terms that would result in the creation of a Palestinian state and greater diplomatic recognition for Israel in the region.

Blinken planned to meet with Arab and European officials in a group later Monday to talk about plans for rebuilding the Gaza Strip, even though Israel is still carrying out its war there and has not stepped back from its difficult — and perhaps impossible — goal of fully eradicating Hamas.

Saudi Arabia is hosting a three-day meeting of the World Economic Forum, and top Arab officials, including Blinken’s diplomatic counterparts, are attending the event in Riyadh. The gathering includes senior ministers from Qatar and Egypt, the two Arab mediators in multiple rounds of talks over a potential cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

“The quickest way to bring this to an end is to get to a cease-fire and the release of hostages,” Blinken said in an onstage talk with Borge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum. “Hamas has before it a proposal that is extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel. And at the moment, the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a cease-fire is Hamas.”

“I’m hopeful they will make the right decision and we can have a fundamental change in the dynamic,” he added.

Blinken and other top aides of President Joe Biden have also been trying to push for a long-term political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is where the broader deal comes in. In a call meant to pave the way for Blinken’s trip, his seventh to the region since the war began, Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke by phone Sunday afternoon for nearly an hour.

The two leaders discussed “increases in the delivery of humanitarian assistance into Gaza,” according to a White House statement released after the call, and Biden repeated his warning against an Israeli ground assault on Rafah in southern Gaza. He also reviewed with Netanyahu the negotiations over a hostage release.

In their best-case scenario, the Biden administration envisions Saudi Arabia and perhaps a few other Arab nations agreeing to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. In exchange, Saudi Arabia would receive advanced weapons and security guarantees, including a mutual defense treaty, from the United States and a commitment for U.S. cooperation on a civilian nuclear program in the kingdom.

For its part, Israel would have to commit to a concrete pathway to the founding of a Palestinian nation, with specific deadlines, U.S. and Saudi officials say.

“I think it’s clear that in the absence of a real political horizon for the Palestinians, it’s going to be much harder, if not impossible, to really have a coherent plan for Gaza itself,” Blinken said at the public talk Monday.

Prince Faisal said Sunday that Saudi officials hoped to discuss concrete steps toward creating a Palestinian state during Blinken’s visit to Riyadh. Calling the war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza “a complete failing of the existing political system,” he told a news conference that the kingdom’s government believes that the only solution is “a credible, irreversible pathway to a Palestinian state.”

Before the war started in October, U.S. and Saudi officials were in intense discussions to reach an agreement on the terms of such a proposal. For those negotiators, a big question at the time was what Israel would agree to. Since the war began, the Americans and the Saudis have publicly insisted that Israel must agree to the existence of a Palestinian state.

But Israeli leaders and ordinary citizens have become even more resistant to that idea since the Oct. 7 attacks, in which the Israeli authorities say Hamas and allied gunmen killed about 1,200 people and took about 240 people as hostages. Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including thousands of children, say officials from the Gaza Health Ministry.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.