White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan will visit Saudi Arabia today for talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Israel tomorrow for a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reported Reuters, quoted by BTA.
The spokesman for the US presidency, John Kirby, announced to reporters that in the talks with the Israelis, Sullivan would emphasize that the fight against "Hamas" in Gaza to be conducted through more precise strikes, and not through full-scale incursions like the one planned against one of the cities in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
At the meeting with the Saudis, Sullivan will discuss "bilateral and regional issues, including the war in the Palestinian enclave, as well as efforts to achieve lasting peace and security in the region.
According to sources, the government "Biden" and Saudi Arabia are currently finalizing an agreement on US security guarantees and assistance in civil nuclear technology. This comes at a time when the conclusion of an agreement to normalize Israeli-Saudi relations as part of a "grand deal" for the Middle East have so far failed to materialize.
Sullivan's talks with Netanyahu and other representatives of the Israeli political leadership will also include the topic of Rafah. Israel has threatened to launch a major offensive against the city, but the US opposes such an operation on humanitarian grounds, as Rafah is crowded with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who fled there from other fighting zones in the Gaza Strip.
Kirby said Sullivan would campaign for a more targeted approach in the fight against Hamas militants. He added that the subject of Sullivan's talks will also be the stalled attempts to conclude an agreement with "Hamas" for the release of the sick, elderly and wounded hostages that radical Palestinian militants took in the October 7 attack on southern Israel.
In his press conference, Kirby announced that a group of American medics who were stranded in a hospital in Gaza, where they were providing medical aid, have now been taken out of the Palestinian enclave.
Earlier in the week, it was reported that US doctors, including ten from the Palestinian American Medical Association, a US-based organization, were unable to leave Gaza after Israel closed the Rafah border crossing. They intended to leave after a two-week mission at the so-called European Hospital in Khan Younis, a town not far from Rafah in southern Gaza.
Yesterday, 17 of a total of 20 American doctors and medics left Gaza, Kirby said.
"I can reassure you that every one of them who wished to leave has left Gaza," he said.
A spokesman for the State Department told Reuters that some of the blocked doctors managed to leave the enclave with the help of the American embassy in Jerusalem.
However, three have decided to stay in Gaza, said a well-informed source, who added that they made the decision with the clear understanding that the US embassy may no longer be able to arrange their departure, as it was able to do yesterday.
Meanwhile, it has become clear that two senior representatives of US President Joe Biden's government have held indirect talks with their Iranian counterparts to avoid an escalation of attacks in the region. This was announced by the American news portal "Axios", quoted by Reuters and BTA.
The talks, which included Biden's Middle East adviser Brett McGurk and Acting US Ambassador to Iran Abram Paley, were the first round of talks between Washington and Tehran since January.
They followed the Iranian missile-drone attack on Israel on April 13.