PMO: Bennett has no plans to meet Abbas, four-way summit report false

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has no plans to meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, his spokesman Matan Sidi clarified on Wednesday as he dismissed reports of a canceled quadrilateral summit in Cairo with Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi and Jordanian King Abdullah.

“There was no intention to hold a meeting between the PA President and there is no expectation that any such meeting will be held,” Sidi said.

He dismissed a report in the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat which said that Bennett has been disinvited from what would have been a quadrilateral meeting in Cairo.

He clarified that Bennett is scheduled to go to Cairo to meet with Sisi, but that no date had been set for the meeting.

“President Sisi invited the Prime Minister to meet in Egypt, and the Prime Minister will meet with him soon,” Sidi said.

Separately, Abbas is scheduled to leave Wednesday for Cairo for a trilateral meeting with Sisi and King Abdullah.

In describing the meeting last Thursday, senior Palestinian official Azzam al-Ahmed said that the three Arab leaders would discuss coordinated positions ahead of Abbas’s address to the UN General Assembly later this month. 

Contacts were underway to hold an Arab summit to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he added.

The Cairo meeting takes place just after Defense Minister Benny Gantz held his first meeting with Abbas in Ramallah late Sunday night. It was the first such high-level meeting in close to a decade. 

It also comes just one week after Bennett had his first meeting with US President Joe Biden in the White House.

When in Washington, Bennett clarified that he has no intention of meeting with Abbas or engaging in negotiations for a peace process.

The US has been the main broker for past Israeli-Palestinian talks, the last round of which was in 2014. Biden, however, has not put forward a new peace initiative or attempted to revive past ones.

PA Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh on Tuesday also clarified that “Washington does not have a peace initiative at all.”

He spoke about the current stalemate in a Zoom talk he gave to the Nizami Ganjavi International Center. 

The new Israeli government, he said, is accelerating its “colonization program and construction of settlements.”

It “has no political platform and no initiative to end the conflict with us. It seems to me that all it cares for is to maintain the status quo and all of us know that the status quo is unsustainable,” Shtayyeh said.

This “political vacuum … is very dangerous,” Shtayyeh warned. 

“It needs to be filled with some initiative. The US does not have an initiative, Europe does not have an initiative, the Israelis have no idea how to end the conflict with us… and Arab countries are going in a totally different direction,” Shtayyeh said.