BICOM

A team of White House advisors landed in Israel last night ahead of meetings today with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in an attempt to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

President Trump’s senior advisor Jared Kushner, Special Envoy for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt and Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategy Dina Powell will meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem before heading to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

The team will attempt to find “a path to substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, combating extremism [and dealing with] the situation in Gaza, including how to ease the humanitarian crisis there” according to White House officials.

Israeli and Palestinian officials have expressed doubts over the possibility of renewing negotiations in the near future. Senior Israeli officials have said that the US aspiration to announce a resumption of peace talks by September, before the UN General Assembly convenes, is unrealistic.

Nabil Shaath, a senior advisor to Abbas, told London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Arabi al-Jadeed that he doubted today’s meeting in Ramallah would lead to anything, adding that it is clear to the Palestinians that there will be no peace deal as long as Prime Minister Netanyahu is in power.

On Tuesday, PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said that more than two decades of peace negotiations with Israelis had produced “nothing,” and called on the international community to unilaterally establish a state of Palestine.

The US team arrived in Israel after a number of meetings with Middle East leaders including Prince Muhammad Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Sisi of Egypt. Yesterday’s scheduled meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry was cancelled after the US decided to withhold US $96m in aid and to delay a further US $195m because of Egypt’s failure to make progress on respecting human rights and democratic norms.

A statement issued after the US meeting with King Abdullah stressed the need to start “serious and effective peace negotiations” on the “basis of the two-state solution”.