President Donald Trump says he hopes Saudi Arabia will join the Abraham Accords "very shortly" ahead of a scheduled White House meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman later this month.
Trump made the comments Friday during a press conference with reporters onboard Air Force One.
Trump has repeatedly said he wants to expand the accords that he brokered during his first term in the White House.
In a television interview broadcast Oct. 17, he said: "I hope to see Saudi Arabia go in, and I hope to see others go in. I think when Saudi Arabia goes in, everybody goes in."
The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain established ties with Israel in 2020 under the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords. Morocco established ties with Israel later the same year.
Trump has been upbeat about the prospects that regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia will finally join the accords since a ceasefire went into effect in Gaza last month, but Riyadh has shown no willingness to move ahead without at least a pathway to Palestinian statehood.
The crown prince, widely known as MbS, "is not likely to entertain any possible formalizing of ties in the near future without at least a credible pathway to a Palestinian state," said Jonathan Panikoff, former deputy U.S. national intelligence officer on the Middle East.
MbS is likely to try to use his influence with Trump to seek "more explicit and vocal buy-in for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state," said Panikoff, who is now at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.
The agreement signed by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco sidestepped the issue of Palestinian statehood.
Trump on Thursday said Kazakhstan will join the accords.
Other Central Asian countries such as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, both of which have close ties with Israel, have also been seen as potentially joining the Abraham Accords, which is considered a signature foreign policy achievement of Trump's first term.
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