US, Middle East partners start talks on next chapter for Gaza

Blinken met Monday with United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and will later meet Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman before traveling to Israel. It’s his fourth visit to the region since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which retaliated by launching a full-scale war in Gaza.

Blinken’s aides say leaders in the Middle East have begun talks about what might come next in Gaza, a fraught subject they didn’t want to discuss during previous visits. The U.S. officials declined to provide details of the negotiations, pointing to Blinken’s prior comments about the importance of unified Palestinian-led governance for the West Bank and Gaza, and efforts to overhaul the Palestinian Authority with the goal of avoiding a lengthy Israeli military operation.

“In my meetings on this trip, we also discussed what each country can do to provide the assurances and the incentives required to build a more secure, a more stable, a more peaceful future for the region," Blinken said Sunday night in Doha, Qatar. “My takeaway from the discussions so far, including here with our friends in Qatar, is that our partners are willing to have these difficult conversations and to make hard decisions."

The hope is to present some ideas with regional buy-in to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials Tuesday before an expected meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday in the occupied West Bank.

“We always see that the priority for us is, first of all, to end this war," said Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, in a press conference with Blinken on Sunday night. “And after ending this war, to find a resolution for the situation in Gaza and the West Bank."

The renewed focus on what comes next in Gaza—an issue that deeply separates Israeli officials from regional leaders—comes as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told The Wall Street Journal that some Israeli forces in Gaza would soon shift from what he called the “intense maneuvering phase of the war" toward “different types of special operations."

The prospect of the conflict potentially starting to wind down in the coming weeks or months has provided an incentive for regional leaders to become more involved in what comes next, U.S. officials say. They hope the prospect of renewing the path for Saudi Arabia to normalize ties with Israel—an effort that was gaining momentum last year before the war began—will provide some momentum to the current talks.

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) visited Israel and Saudi Arabia in recent days in an effort to restart talks on normalizing relations between the two countries.

“I leave here fairly optimistic," Graham said last week after meeting with senior Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, to see if there was a consensus over restarting talks with the kingdom. He told reporters that, as part of a deal, the Saudis would need to be involved in the postwar Gaza planning.

Another incentive for Israel is that Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations could help rebuild Gaza, but likely not under an Israeli occupation, U.S. officials say. But Gulf nations, which have historically pumped billions of dollars of aid into the Palestinian territories, say they are unwilling to do so again without a realistic and irreversible pathway to the peaceful resolution of the Palestinian issue.

The prospect of longer-term regional security could lure partners to difficult near-term concessions on governance in Gaza. But any potential deal faces big hurdles: With widespread anger in the region toward Israel and the U.S., it isn’t clear how much scope regional leaders have to work with Blinken or Israeli leaders.

The Gaza war has deepened popular opposition to Israel in the Arab world. An opinion poll of 1,000 Saudis conducted late last year by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank found that 96% of them believe that Arab countries should break all contact with Israel in protest of its military actions in Gaza.

Another problem for the U.S. and Israel is the condition of the Palestinian Authority, which U.S. officials see as the governing entity for the future in Gaza. Israeli officials have limited the authority’s access to funds, while Abbas’s government, which has canceled elections regularly, has been widely criticized in Israel and abroad for alleged corruption and a lack of democratic support.

Assuming Hamas can be defeated or pushed to the side in Gaza, another thorny issue is who will oversee security there. While rejecting a lengthy Israeli occupation, U.S., Arab and Turkish leaders are reluctant to participate in a multinational security force, and Palestinian Authority forces are seen as underfunded and concentrated in the West Bank.

Meanwhile, some in Israel have proposed that local leaders in Gaza help administer the territory under an Israeli security umbrella, but Arab leaders have insisted on a single Palestinian entity.

Write to William Mauldin at william.mauldin@wsj.com and Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com