Abbas had congratulated Lapid on becoming prime minister, the statement said, while Lapid conveyed his best wishes to the Palestinian leader ahead of Eid al-Adha, the Muslim holiday that begins Friday.
The Palestinian news agency Wafa also broadcast the phone conversation, adding that President Abbas had expressed his desire for “peace and stability to prevail in the region as soon as possible.”
Lapid’s predecessor, the right-wing Naftali Bennett, chose not to speak to Abbas during his 12-month tenure as prime minister, while longtime leader Benjamin Netanyahu oversaw the deterioration of Israel’s relations with the Palestinian Authority and is reported to have last spoken to the Palestinian leader in 2017.
Underscoring the current Israeli government’s shift in approach, Defense Minister Benny Gantz visited Abbas at his office in Ramallah on Thursday night.
During the meeting, the Palestinian leader “stressed the importance of creating a political horizon [and] commitment to signed agreements,” Wafa said, referring to a series of agreements signed between the two sides in the 1990s.
A statement from Ganj’s office said the meeting discussed “security and political coordination ahead of US President Biden’s visit to Israel.”
In addition to Israel, Biden is also scheduled to visit the West Bank next week, where he will meet with Abbas — the first meeting between the Palestinian leader and a US president since 2017. The White House hopes the meeting will helps draw a line under the significant breakdown in US-Palestinian relations seen under the Trump administration.
In a separate development earlier this week, Abbas traveled to Algeria where he met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, also for the first time in several years.
The meeting took place on the sidelines of celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of Algeria’s independence, Algeria’s state-run news agency reported.
Relations between Abbas’s Fatah party, the largest Palestinian faction, and Hamas, the Islamist group that rules Gaza, have been strained for years. By June 2007, the two groups were in open conflict with each other, in violence that led to the end of the Palestinian Authority’s control of Gaza.
