AMMAN: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas held talks on Wednesday with King Abdullah before the Jordanian monarch’s key visit to Washington.

The king will be the first Arab leader to meet at the White House with President Joe Biden and his team.

Two Jordanian army helicopters flew to Ramallah to transport Abbas and his team to the talks.

After a one-on-one meeting in the presence of Crown Prince Hussein, Jordanian and Palestinian teams joined their leaders.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Malki, senior Fatah official Hussein Sheikh, Palestinian intelligence service chief Majed Faraj, and senior diplomatic adviser Majdi Khalidi attended the meeting.

On the Jordanian side, Prime Minister Bisher Khasawneh, Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, General Intelligence Director Ahmad Hosni and other officials were present, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Jordan’s Petra news agency said the king reiterated Jordan’s support for Palestinians “to obtain their just and legitimate rights in establishing their independent, sovereign and viable state, on the June 4, 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

King Abdullah stressed the need to translate the cease-fire agreement in Gaza into a permanent truce in order to pave the way for Palestinian rights, Petra said.

Abbas highlighted Jordan’s critical role in defending the rights of Palestinians in international circles.

Samir Habashneh, a former Jordanian interior minister, told Arab News that the Biden administration has yet to decide on its approach to the Palestinian conflict.

“For sure, it is different from the Trump administration’s direction and for sure it is in support of the two-state solution, but it hasn’t yet identified the alternative,” he said.

Habashneh, a leading member of a reform committee set up by King Abdullah, said that in a recent meeting the monarch stressed the importance of support for the two-state solution.

“The king’s strong opposition to the Trump plan played a major role in its defeat, but we need to work out the mechanism for how to move forward,” he said.

Habashneh said that he hopes Jordan can influence a Palestinian reconciliation.

“If I can whisper in the ears of our Palestinian brethren, it would be to move fast in the reconciliation process in order to block Israeli efforts to avoid dealing with the Palestinian leadership.”

Hazem Kawasmi, a Jerusalem-based political activist, told Arab News that the situation is quickly deteriorating and there is a need to “find ways to put out all these fires.”

He said: “Things in Jerusalem, and especially in Silwan, with tens of homes slated for destruction, are worrying as is the internal Palestinian protests in light of the death of Nizar Banat and the attacks on peaceful Palestinian protesters by the Palestinian security.”

The family of Banat, a prominent critic of the Palestinian Authority, who died in detention on June 24, said that security forces broke into his house in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron and hit him repeatedly with a metal rod before arresting him.

Oraib Rantawi, director of Al-Quds Center for Political Affairs, told Arab News that the Biden administration is stepping up its coordination with Jordan and Egypt, while “Trump and his people gave preference to the Gulf countries, and disregarded Jordan and Egypt.”

Rantawi said: “I expect that the internal situation is worrying Jordan, and Abbas will most certainly receive friendly advice from King Abdullah on the need to address internal issues that have weakened Abbas and his administration.”

Lamis Andoni, a longtime observer of Jordanian-Palestinian relations, told Arab News: “What is happening in Jerusalem, and its effects on the region and the future, will be an important topic discussed between them.”

Trump’s policies were a major problem for both Jordan and Palestine, she added.

“The policies of the previous US administration gave legitimacy to Israel to increase its expansion into Palestinian lands,” Andoni said.

She said that the Jordan visit is intended to strengthen Abbas’ standing amid growing protests and criticism directed at the Palestinian leader, she said.

“He needs to appear to be still representing the Palestinian Authority.”

ALEXANDRIA: The Yemeni model abducted and put on trial in Sanaa by the Iran-backed Houthi militia was being treated in hospital on Wednesday after trying to kill herself in prison.

Entesar Al-Hammadi’s suicide attempt took place on Monday inside a Houthi-controlled jail. Her lawyer, Khaled Mohammed Al-Kamal, told Arab News she had tried to hang herself shortly after the Houthis moved her into a wing for “prostitutes.” She was saved when a child cried out after seeing her hanging.

“She felt humiliated by the Houthis shaming her,” Al-Kamal said. “Her mental and physical condition is very, very difficult.”

Born to a Yemeni father and an Ethiopian mother, Al-Hammadi, 20, was snatched from a street in Sanaa with two friends on Feb. 20 and on put on trial on charges of prostitution, drug dealing, and breaching Islamic norms.

The Houthis refused to release her despite intense local and international pressure, and after placing her in solitary confinement, the group banned media coverage of the case and replaced a prosecutor who had ordered her release.

Al-Hammadi denied the accusations and threatened a hunger strike if the Houthis refused to free her. Yemeni activists who visited her in prison in May said she told them that the Houthis punished her for refusing to spy for them.

Michael Page, deputy Middle East director of Human Rights Watch, said Al-Hammadi was facing an unfair trial and the Houthis had prevented her lawyer from seeing case documents.

“The Houthi authorities should ensure her rights to due process, including access to her charges and evidence against her so she can challenge it, and immediately drop charges that are so broad and vague that they are arbitrary,” he said.

Ahmed Arman, Yemen’s minister of legal affairs and human rights, told Arab News the Houthi handling of the case was typical of their mistreatment of prisoners.

CAIRO: Egypt is monitoring ports and airports to prevent any new COVID-19 variants entering the country, according to a health official.

Mohammed Awad Taj El-Din, adviser to the president for health and preventive affairs, said: “The peak of the third wave of the coronavirus has ended, and the number of infections and deaths is decreasing.

“We are in a period of practical relaxation, and we are taking advantage of this opportunity to support hospitals that need equipment, maintenance and supplies.”

However, since the coronavirus crisis has yet to end, precautionary and preventive measures must be taken “with all available means,” he added.

The health official’s comments come amid a push by President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and the Egyptian government to step up the country’s vaccination program.

Under an agreement, Africa will receive 400 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine produced in South Africa, with Egypt getting 20 million doses, Taj El-Din said.

The vaccines were due to be administered in September, but intense negotiations launched by Egypt mean the country will get the jabs from July.

Taj El-Din said that only one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is needed and that its price has been reduced from $10 per dose to $7.50 following the talks.

“We will need to be revaccinated against coronavirus after six months, nine months at the most. We are studying whether the revaccination will be done twice or only once,” he said.

Meanwhile, Hala Zayed, the health minister, described the local production of the first 300,000 doses of Egyptian-made Sinovac vaccine as “a great victory.”

Zayed said that two factories affiliated with the Egyptian Holding Company for Biological Products and Vaccines have been opened, the first with a production capacity of 300,000 doses per day and an annual production capacity of 110 to 220 million doses.

The second factory will operate with a production capacity of 3 million daily doses and 1 billion annual doses, she said.

Egypt, together with experts from India and China, is working to equip the factory in order to export the jabs to Africa and the region.

According to government data, Egypt is witnessing a significant decrease in new cases, with 261 recorded on Tuesday, the lowest number since Nov. 16, 2020.

The latest figure marks a dramatic fall compared with the 376 cases recorded on Monday and brings the overall total to 281,031.

MISSOURI, US: After more than 10 years of civil war, Syria remains a devastated country. An estimated 500,000 people have perished in the conflict, with the large majority victims of President Bashar Assad’s vicious operations to regain control of the country.

Some 12 million Syrians have become refugees or internally displaced persons after losing their homes.

At least 90 percent of the population now lives below the poverty line. Roughly one-third of Syria’s infrastructure lies in ruins. Aid organizations estimate that about 11 million Syrians are at present in need of humanitarian assistance, with famine looming as even bread and fuel supplies continue to dwindle.

Under such circumstances, the natural reflex might be to set aside objections regarding the Assad regime and move on to the difficult but very pressing work of helping people in Syria.

For all intents and purposes, Assad has won the war in any case, largely thanks to Russian and Iranian assistance. Keeping Syria isolated and sanctioned would only prolong the misery of a people that has suffered enough already, so the theory goes.

Allowing the Assad regime back into the international fold, however, poses serious moral and practical problems. Does the international community really want to “let bygones be bygones” with a ruler who has massacred hundreds of thousands of his own civilians?

Many cannot accept the moral stain that would come with forgiving a regime that used chemical weapons against its own people, intentionally targeted hospitals in airstrikes, and committed mass executions of political prisoners — among other things.

If Assad sees his crimes forgiven, the message to other authoritarian leaders dealing with political protests would seem clear: They can do as they will, and the world will soon forget their transgressions. Thankfully, leaving the Syrian people to their misery or rehabilitating the Assad regime are not the only two options available.

There remain ways to help Syrians while simultaneously keeping the regime isolated and shunned.

First of all, Assad currently only controls two-thirds of Syrian territory. Rebel-held Idlib province in the north holds on with Turkish backing, while Turkey also occupies Afrin and another swathe of territory in the northeast.

The Syrian Kurds control a large tract of territory in the northeast as well, which includes 90 percent of Syria’s oil wells and a good chunk of its agricultural land.

Keeping 90 percent of Syria’s oil revenues out of Assad’s hands can go a long way toward punishing his regime and empowering other Syrian actors, particularly given that oil revenues normally flow directly into government coffers (the rentier state model).

The people in these patches of territory should benefit from cross-border international assistance that does not have to pass through the Syrian capital Damascus. This requires continually renewing UN resolutions allowing for such aid, and Russia needs to be convinced not to veto such moves.

More than a million people in the rebel-controlled northwest risk being cut off if the UN Security Council does not renew authorization for cross-border aid delivery through the Bab Al-Hawa crossing at the Turkish border — the last remaining crossing for UN aid. A decision is expected in the next two weeks.

“Reaching all Syrians in need via the most direct routes is not a political choice; it is a humanitarian imperative,” David Miliband, chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, said recently. But if the past is any guide, Security Council action on Syria is not driven by what Miliband called the “stark humanitarian realities.”

In 2020, China and Assad regime-backer Russia vetoed resolutions that would have allowed two other crossing points — Bab Al-Salam and Al-Yaroubiya — to remain open. Now Russia has hinted it will block the renewal of the resolution on Bab Al-Hawa, insisting other aid routes via Damascus are available.

“It is shameful that political posturing at the Security Council is still impeding the international response to one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time,” Diana Semaan, Syria researcher at Amnesty International, said in a June 25 statement.

She added: “Years of hostilities and mass displacement have led to a humanitarian disaster in northwest Syria.”

Aid agencies are skeptical about the Syrian government’s ability to replace the Bab Al-Hawa aid corridor in view of its hand in last year’s fiasco in the Kurdish-controlled northeast.

In Jan. 2020, the Al-Yaroubiya crossing closed, ending UN delivery of aid across the border from Iraq. UN operations through the crossing were supposed to be replaced by deliveries from Damascus. However, the volume of aid reaching the area declined sharply due to the regime’s bureaucratic impediments and restrictions on access.

“The notion that the Syrian government can replace UN aid is absurd. Not only would it be impossible for the government to match the scale of support provided cross-border, the authorities are notorious for systematically blocking humanitarian access,” Semaan added.

Clearly, until the Assad regime changes or adopts the kind of reforms necessary to safeguard people under its rule, no one should rush to encourage a return of Syrian central government control over these areas.

The Kurdish-led enclaves in particular should be recognized as a more legitimate and authentic local political authority than the Assad regime. This can occur without calling into question the territorial integrity of the Syrian state.

There exists a myriad of historical and contemporary examples of such recognition, whether in the form of governments in exile or governments in control of only a portion of a state’s territory.

The Kurdish-led cantons have in fact proved much more liberal toward various religious and ethnic groups in their territory than the Assad regime, and more democratic as well. In the case of Turkish-backed Idlib province, a return to central government control would also precipitate yet another refugee crisis, with people fleeing the Assad regime’s vengeance.

For the Syrian population that remains under the writ of Assad, the international community needs to find ways to support their economic recovery without empowering or recognizing Assad’s regime.

This means avoiding broad and wide-ranging sanctions on Syria. While more narrow, targeted sanctions against the Assad regime and its officials can and should continue, the Syrian people as a whole need not fall within this sanction net.

A lot of basic infrastructure in Syria also needs rebuilding, of course, but such projects seem difficult to contemplate for an international community that does not wish to recognize or rehabilitate the Assad regime.

This task might therefore best be left to Assad’s Russia patrons, according to one school of opinion. Its logic goes something like this: It was Russian air power and Russian-supplied armaments that destroyed much of the infrastructure in any case, so let them be the ones to rebuild it.

On the diplomatic front, state-controlled media in Damascus recently hailed the resumption of Syrian relations with a number of Arab states and even a few Western ones — claiming that the thaw in relations came “after Syrian President Bashar Assad won a landslide re-election victory” in May.

Leaving aside the dubious nature of Assad’s elections, the fact remains that channels of communication with Syria need to be reopened at some point.

A majority of Arab League states seem to now support some level of reconciliation with Assad’s Syria and Syria’s readmission to the organization. This seems necessary if only to coordinate humanitarian aid for the Syrian people.

Without some form of Arab constructive engagement in Syria, the future of the country could well be decided by the Middle East’s new powers: Iran, Russia, Turkey and Israel.

The way forward thus appears littered with the same kind of contradictions that bedeviled Syria throughout its civil war: A series of bad and worse options, none of which offer a very satisfactory resolution.

• David Romano is Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University

AL-MUKALLA: The Iran-backed Houthi militias on Monday ordered local financial institutions to freeze the funds and assets of a major private bank in Yemen, a day after members of the group stormed a mansion in Sanaa owned by a local businessman.

Citing a judicial order, the Houthi-controlled central bank in Sanaa told local banks and exchange firms to take the action against Tadhamon International Islamic Bank (TIIB), a commercial bank owned by Hayel Saeed Anam Group, a Yemeni family-owned conglomerate.

The Houthis did not give a reason for the court order but Yemeni officials and economists said that the group wants to bring the private sector under its control in the territories it rules, and collect tax revenues to fund its military activities.

In November last year, TIIB was forced to close its operations across Yemen following a raid by the Houthis on its headquarter in Sanaa. Employees were forced to leave the office and the bank’s cameras and servers were confiscated.

The Houthi central bank accused the business of being involved in illegal activities such as currency speculation and smuggling money abroad. The bank strongly denied the claims and reopened several days later, after the Houthis left its offices.

Waled Al-Attas, an assistant professor of financial and banking sciences at Hadramout University, told Arab News that the latest action taken by the Houthis will have little effect on the bank’s operations and the rebels are simply trying to put pressure on it to comply.

“There is no direct influence on the bank,” he said. “They meant to compel the bank to implement what the movement wants.”

If the Houthis were serious about closing the bank they would have confiscated the bank’s assets at the central bank in Sanaa and closed branches by force, Al-Attas added.

“The bank carried out operations smoothly today,” he said.

Quoting a source inside the Houthi central bank, local news site Yemen Future reported that the Houthis took the action against the bank after it refused to freeze an account of a convicted Yemeni individual.

On Sunday, local businessman Mohammed Yahiya Al-Haifi appealed to Abdul Malik Al-Houthi, leader of the Houthi movement, complaining that armed Houthis had stormed his mansion in Sanaa after accusing him of working with the Israelis and hosting a secret hiding place on behalf of the US embassy.

He accused Houthi leaders of seizing control of his mansion, freezing his bank accounts and pressuring him to relinquish his properties and businesses under the pretext that he had colluded with the US, Israel and the Arab coalition.

“They accused me of being an agent for America and Israel and working with the aggression against Yemen,” he said in his appeal.

Analysts said the targeting of Al-Haifi is part of a continuing Houthi crackdown on Yemeni businessmen and banks that refuse to cooperate with the movement’s efforts to fund its military activities across the country.

Since taking power in late 2014, the Houthis have confiscated the properties of hundreds of Yemeni politicians, journalists, human rights activists, and military and security officials in Sanaa.