Report: Netanyahu to Meet Trump’s ‘Peace Team’ at Warsaw Mideast Conference

YERUSHALAYIM
Senior Advisor Jared Kushner and Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt meet with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the Prime Minister’s office on June 22, 2018. (Matty Stern/U.S. Embassy Jerusalem)

The White House “peace team” — President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and Middle East negotiation coordinator Jason Greenblatt — will attend the Warsaw conference on the Middle East over Feb. 13-14, a senior White House official told Channel 13’s Barak Ravid on Thursday.

Kushner and Greenblatt are expected to hold meetings with foreign European and Gulf State officials regarding the Trump administration’s forthcoming Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.

Among the foreign officials in attendance at the conference will be Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Oman and Jordan. Netanyahu is expected to meet with Kushner and Greenblatt.

Palestinian and Iranian representatives were not invited to the conference.

The conference was first framed as an anti-Iran event but after protests from several U.S. allies and pressure on Poland from Iran it was reframed as “The Ministerial Conference to Promote a Future of Peace and Security in the Middle East.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the summit would focus on stability and security in the Middle East, including the “important element of making sure that Iran is not a destabilizing influence.”

An Iranian Foreign Ministry official told Poland‘s charge d’affaires in Tehran that Iran saw the decision to host the meeting as a “hostile act against Iran” and warned that Tehran could reciprocate.

“The international community has the right to discuss various regional and global problems,” the Polish Foreign Ministry said, adding that Poland has the right to co-host a conference that aims to develop a platform for action for the stability and prosperity of the Middle East.

Kushner is expected to participate in one of the sessions of the conference. It’s still unclear how much, if anything, he will reveal about the U.S. Middle East peace plan during the conference. The plan has been in the works for the last two years but won’t be launched before the April 9 elections in Israel.

Relations between Tehran and Washington are highly fraught after the decision in May by President Donald Trump to withdraw from a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers and to reimpose sanctions, including on Iran‘s oil sector.

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