US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo landed in Israel on Wednesday for a farewell visit as the chief diplomat of the strongly pro-Israeli Trump administration. He is on a Europe and Middle East tour that has so far taken him to France, Turkey and Georgia, reported AFP. 

Pompeo has so far backed Donald Trump in not conceding to President-elect Joe Biden.

He flew to Israel on the same day as the foreign minister of Bahrain, one of several Arab states that have agreed under US-brokered pacts to normalise relations with the Jewish state.

Palestinians have decried as a “betrayal” the historic deals that Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates signed with Israel and which have since been matched in principle by Sudan. They staged a protest as Pompeo was expected to become the first US top diplomat to visit a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, where a vineyard has named one of its wines after him.

Pompeo was to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Abdellatif al-Zayani at the start of his two-day visit. Zayani said his trip, the first official visit to the Jewish state by a Bahraini official, marked “a further step on our journey towards a better, more peaceful, more secure and more prosperous Middle East.”

All three countries, and other Gulf Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, share a strong animosity toward Shiite Muslim regional power Iran.

Also read| Donald Trump asked aides about striking Iran nuke site: Report

They accuse the Islamic republic of seeking to build a nuclear bomb, fuelling unrest from Syria and Iraq to Lebanon and Yemen, and of seeking the destruction of Israel.

Israel said it had hit Iranian targets in Syria with overnight air strikes, in its latest of many attacks in the war-torn country. An Israeli army statement said its fighter jets had attacked “military targets belonging to the Iranian Quds Force and the Syrian armed forces”. The elite Quds Force is the main foreign operations arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Britain-based monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 10 people were killed, including foreign fighters and Syrian soldiers. 

Pompeo had no scheduled meetings with Palestinian leaders, who have strongly rejected Trump’s stance on the conflict, including Washington’s recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. But Israeli press reports said he was due to visit the Jewish Psagot vineyard in a settlement in the West Bank, a trip the State Department and the vineyard have so far declined to confirm to AFP.

Dozens of Palestinians demonstrated in Al-Bireh, a community opposite Psagot, located between Jerusalem and Ramallah, and some threw stones at soldiers guarding the entrance to the settlement. Israeli planning and building of settlements in the Palestinian Territories has boomed under successive Netanyahu governments and especially since Trump took office four years ago. More than 450,000 Israelis now live in West Bank settlements, which are considered illegal under international law.

Some 2.8 million Palestinians also live in the territory occupied by Israel since 1967. Pompeo said a year ago that the United States no longer considered Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be contrary to international law. Those comments were hailed by the Psagot vineyard, which has been fighting to keep the label “Israel” on its bottles, rather than the phrase “Israeli settlements” demanded by several European court rulings.

The Palestinian prime minister, Mohammed Shtayyeh, said Pompeo “is going to visit the Jewish settlement simply because he is visiting a winery that has produced a bottle of wine named after him. “If international relations are designed on a bottle of wine, it’s to hell with international relations”, he said.