Leaders fly to Saudi Arabia for talks on Mideast conflicts

RIYADH: Arab and other Muslim leaders have begun arriving in Saudi Arabia for a summit scheduled for Monday that will focus on Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, Saudi state media said.

The Saudi foreign ministry announced the summit in late October during the first meeting of an “international alliance” pushing for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Attendees will “discuss the continued Israeli aggression on the Palestinian territories and the Lebanese Republic, and the current developments in the region,” the official Saudi Press Agency said on Sunday.

It comes one year after a similar gathering in Riyadh of the Cairo-based Arab League and the Jeddah-based Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) during which leaders condemned Israeli forces’ actions in Gaza as “barbaric”. The Saudi state-affiliated Al-Ekhbariya news channel broadcast footage on Sunday of Nigerian President Bola Tinubu and Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati landing in Riyadh.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was also scheduled to attend, the Pakistani foreign ministry said last week, adding that he planned to call for “an immediate end to the genocide in Gaza” and the “immediate cessation of the ongoing Israeli adventurism in the region”.

The 57-member OIC and 22-member Arab League include countries which recognise Israel and those firmly opposed to its regional integration.

Last year’s summit in Riyadh saw disagreement on measures like severing economic and diplomatic ties with Israel and disrupting its oil supplies.

The war in Gaza erupted with Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on October 7 last year, which resulted in 1,206 deaths, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures. Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed more than 43,600 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to data from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.