The Biden Administration issued a strong protest to the Israeli government following the disclosure that Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen met with his Libyan counterpart, Najla Mangoush, in Rome last week, Walla correspondent Barak Ravid reported.
According to US officials who spoke to Ravid, the Biden Administration has been attempting for the last two years to get Libya to join the Abraham Accords, the peace and normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab nations brokered by the Trump Administration in 2020. The officials claimed that the disclosure of the meeting between Cohen and Mangoush complicates those efforts.
"It killed the channel of talks with Libya and made our efforts to promote normalization with other countries much more difficult," said one American official.
The Biden Administration apparently understood that the meeting was meant to be secret, and were therefore blind-sighted when Minister Cohen revealed that the meeting had taken place.
Senior American officials claimed that after Cohen's announcement, the Libyans were horrified and claimed that they did not intend for the meeting to be publicized.
The announcement was met with widespread outrage in Libya, prompting Prime Minister Abdul Hamid al-Dbeibah to suspend and later fire Mangoush. The Libyan Foreign Ministry acknowledged that al-Dbeibah knew about and even approved the meeting, but this did not save Mangoush's job.
A senior US official noted that officials at the US State Department and the US Embassy in Israel contacted Minister Cohen and other senior officials at the Foreign Ministry on Sunday evening and expressed their strong protest at the publication of the meeting.
According to the report, Foreign Minister Cohen and his staff claimed to the Americans that they were not the ones who leaked the meeting and that they only reacted after the information was leaked to one of the Israeli media outlets.
The Biden Administration doubts Cohen's explanation. An American senior official said that even if there had been a leak, the Israeli Foreign Ministry could have said: "No comment" instead of issuing an official statement confirming the holding of the meeting and expressing pride over it.