RIYADH (Dispatches) – U.S. President Joe Biden headed to Saudi Arabia to discuss energy supply, human rights, and security cooperation in Saudi Arabia on Friday on a trip designed to reset the U.S. relationship with the kingdom.
Biden will hold meetings with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, along with other government officials, a senior Biden administration official told reporters.
At the start of Biden’s trip to the Middle East, officials said he would avoid close contacts, such as shaking hands, as a precaution against COVID-19. But the president ended up engaging in hand-shaking in the Israeli-occupied territories.
“The president’s going to meet about a dozen leaders and he’ll greet them as he usually does,” the administration official said.
The U.S. is eager to see Saudi Arabia pump more oil to help bring down the high cost of gasoline and ease the highest U.S. inflation in four decades.
Biden had promised during his election campaign to hold the Saudi leader accountable for the brutal murder of the Saudi journalist who was residing in the U.S.
He also called for Saudi leaders to be treated as “the pariah that they are” when the kingdom was having a friendly relationship with his predecessor, Donald Trump.
Earlier on his tour, Biden met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, as hundreds of people staged a demonstration to express their outright rejection of his visit to the occupied territories on his first Middle East tour as the U.S. president.
Earlier this week, the secretary general of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement said Joe Biden’s Middle East visit was aimed at promoting the normalization project and getting Saudi leaders to pump new crude supplies into the world oil market, adding that the U.S. president had nothing to offer to the Palestinian people.
“Biden primarily came to persuade the Persian Gulf countries to produce and export more oil and gas,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech on the occasion of the outbreak of the 2006 war between Hezbollah and the Zionist regime.
Biden, Nasrallah said, is also in the region to ensure that the United States stands alongside the Zionist regime and its project of normalization with the Persian Gulf countries.
Meanwhile, dozens of Palestinian activists demonstrated outside the Augusta Victoria Hospital in East al-Quds, as Biden was visiting the medical facility.
The activists hoisted Palestinian flags and black banners, reminding the US president that the lives of the Palestinian people matter.
Palestinian sources, who asked not to be named, said a large number of Zionist troops were deployed outside the hospital.
The troops later engaged in clashes with Palestinian protesters as they tried to disperse the crowd.
Separately, the leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad resistance movement said Biden’s visit to the region is meant to secure the interests of the United States as well as the security of the occupying regime.
“We, as a Palestinian people and resistance front, must draw lessons and stop cherishing dreams about such a political development,” Ziyad al-Nakhalah said in an exclusive interview with the Arabic-language Palestine Today news agency.