Washington appeared ready to ignore Riyadh’s demand for two states.

The day before his Gaza announcement, Trump was asked whether a normalization deal could proceed without a two-state solution.
He said: “Saudi Arabia is going to be very helpful.”

Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, had held meetings in Riyadh in late January.
Two senior diplomats said Witkoff laid out a three-month timeline for the normalization process.

But Saudi frustration quickly turned into surprise and then anger when Trump announced his Gaza idea.
“He is not pleased,” a source close to the Saudi royal court said of Prince Mohammed’s reaction.

The level of anger was quickly evident in state media broadcasts — which analysts say are often a measure of official Saudi viewpoints — with television news reports personally excoriating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Aziz Alghashian, a Saudi analyst familiar with official thinking, describing the mood among senior Saudi officials.
1. “They are outraged,”
2. This is outrageous.
3. More than frustration, this is on another level.”

Many experts say Trump may be using an old bargaining ploy from his diplomatic playbook, setting out an extreme position as an opening gambit for negotiations. During his first term, he often issued what were widely seen as over-the-top foreign policy pronouncements, many of which never came to fruition.

Still, it has complicated the normalization talks.
Frustration was running high in the kingdom over the ongoing war, two regional intelligence sources said.

Former Saudi intelligence head Prince Turki al-Faisal, who holds no current role in the government, said in a CNN interview last week that if Trump visited Riyadh, “I’m sure he will get an earful from the leadership here.”

Asked if he could see any prospect of normalization talks advancing with Israel, he said: “Not at all.”