Riyadh — Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and Prime Minister on Monday called on Israel to respect Iran’s sovereignty and refrain from attacking Iranian soil, highlighting warming ties between the Middle East rivals.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told a summit of Arab and Muslim leaders that the international community should oblige Israel “to respect the sovereignty of the sisterly Islamic Republic of Iran and not to violate its lands”.
After years of diplomatic impasse, in March 2023, however, Saudi Arabia and Iran announced a rapprochement deal brokered by China.
Though issues remain in the complex relationship, the rapprochement amounts to a signature diplomatic achievement for Prince Mohammed, who has taken a more conciliatory approach to regional diplomacy in recent years.
Saudi Arabia and Iran have maintained high-level contact as part of efforts to contain the war that broke out in Gaza following Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on October 7 last year.
This diplomatic outreach led to the first phone call between Prince Mohammed and Iran’s then-president Ebrahim Raisi — just five days after the war broke out — and a visit by Raisi to Riyadh a year ago for a joint summit of the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
In October, Saudi Arabia announced it had held war games with Iran and other countries in the Sea of Oman.
On Sunday, Saudi Arabia’s top military official, Fayyad al-Ruwaili, arrived in Tehran for talks with Iranian officials.
Prince Mohammed and Iran’s current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, spoke by phone on Sunday ahead of Monday’s summit, which is a follow-up to the gathering in November 2023.
Pezeshkian is not attending because of pressing “executive matters”, an Iranian government statement said, and First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref travelled to Riyadh instead.
The Gaza war and subsequent fighting in Lebanon between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah raised fears of even wider conflagration. Iran this year twice fired missiles at Israel, prompting Israeli retaliation, most recently on October 26 when it hit Iranian military facilities.
Before the war in Gaza, Saudi Arabia was in talks about a so-called mega-deal that would have seen it recognize Israel in exchange for deeper security and bilateral ties with the United States.
That would have built on the Abraham Accords brokered during Donald Trump’s first term as president.
The restored ties between Riyadh and Tehran have reshaped the diplomatic landscape, which Trump will have to reckon with when he takes office again next year, said H.A. Hellyer, Middle East expert at the Royal United Services Institute.
“Clearly, Riyadh and Tehran are warming their relationship, and this is a very different regional environment as compared to when Trump was last in office,” Hellyer said.
“Trump may want to expand the Abraham Accords when he takes office next year, but unless Israel changes tack drastically in the region, that’s going to (be) fraught with many more challenges than last time.”
SUMMIT OF NATIONS
Earlier, Arab and Muslim leaders demanded on Monday that Israel withdraw from occupied Palestinian territories as a precondition for regional peace, while denouncing “shocking” Israeli crimes in war-ravaged Gaza.
A summit meeting in the Saudi capital Riyadh gave the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s 57 nations a chance to speak with one voice on turmoil engulfing the region, more than a year into the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
It came less than a week after Donald Trump secured a second term as president of the United States, Israel’s top military backer.
The summit’s closing statement said that “a just and comprehensive peace in the region… cannot be achieved without ending the Israeli occupation of all occupied Arab territories to the line of June 4, 1967,” referring to the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem as well as Gaza and the Golan Heights.
The statement mentioned UN resolutions which have called on Israel to withdraw from these areas, and the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, in which Arab nations offered Israel normalized ties in return for a two-state agreement with the Palestinians along the 1967 lines.
The international community should “launch a plan with specific steps and timing under international sponsorship” to make a sovereign Palestinian state a reality, the statement said.
Hamas later urged Arab and Muslim nations to back up those pledges with action.
“The establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital would require more immediate efforts and practical solutions to force (Israel) to stop its aggression and genocide against our people,” Hamas said in a statement.
The hard-right Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains opposed to Palestinian statehood and Israel’s new foreign minister, Gideon Saar, dismissed the prospect as not “realistic”.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich later Monday vowed to push for annexation of parts of the West Bank in 2025.
The Riyadh summit reiterated regional leaders’ call for Palestinian territories — including Gaza, which is separated from the West Bank by Israeli territory — to be grouped together in a future state.
The leaders also condemned “horrific and shocking crimes” by Israel’s army, saying they occurred “in the context of the crime of genocide”.
Addressing Monday’s summit, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati warned that his country was suffering an “existential” crisis.
Trump’s election last week for a second term in the White House was likely on leaders’ minds, said Anna Jacobs, senior Gulf analyst for the International Crisis Group think tank.
“This summit is very much an opportunity for regional leaders to signal to the incoming Trump administration what they want in terms of US engagement,” she said.
Iranian First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref said in his remarks that “the world is waiting” for Trump “to immediately stop the war against the innocent people of Gaza and Lebanon”.
The final statement included a call for a ban on the export and transfer of weapons to Israel.
Despite criticism of the impact Israel’s military campaign has had on Gaza civilians, outgoing US President Joe Biden has ensured that Washington remains Israel’s most important military backer during more than a year of fighting.
In his first term, Trump defied international consensus with a series of moves praised by the Israeli government but condemned by Palestinians.
He recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the US embassy there, and endorsed Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are illegal under international law.