Che rare visit by the Jordanian king to Ramallah, the first since 2017, follows a meeting on Sunday between Mahmoud Abbas and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The visit of the Jordanian king, which comes a few days before Ramadan, is seen as an attempt to ease tensions in Palestine. Palestinian officials have repeatedly warned that the situation in the West Bank is on the verge of“explode”.
About 475,000 Israelis reside there in settlements, deemed illegal under international law. Some 2.9 million Palestinians also live in the West Bank.
Israel has occupied this territory since 1967, which was then in the hands of Jordan. Amman signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, the second Arab country to do so following Egypt in 1979.
Other Arab countries have recently normalized their relations with the Jewish state, breaking with decades of Arab consensus conditioning the establishment of relations with Israel with the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The United Arab Emirates normalized relations with Israel in 2020 under a series of agreements brokered by the United States. Bahrain and Morocco followed suit.
The heads of diplomacy of these three countries have been meeting since Sunday for an unprecedented two-day meeting in the Israeli Negev desert (south) with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Israeli counterpart Yair Lapid.
The Islamist movement Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip, considered that the meeting described as“historical” by the Jewish state, served to “Legitimize crimes” of the latter and to the” to integrate “ in the region, which constitutes ” a danger “.
