The President of the United States, Joe Biden, defended Thursday the importance of Israel “being fully integrated in the region”, after a meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, who is also Foreign Minister, in the framework of an official visit to the country that began during the day on Wednesday.

“We have had a good start for a long relationship, God willing. I talked about how important it is, from my perspective, for Israel to be fully integrated in the region,” he said, following the agreements signed since 2020 between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco to normalize their diplomatic relations.

He also stressed that “the vast majority of the American population, not just the Administration, are totally committed to Israel’s security”, while Lapid emphasized that both have addressed “the Iranian threat” and the need for “no nuclear Iran”. “This is not only a threat to Israel, but to the whole world,” the Israeli Prime Minister defended.

Lapid also noted that the two discussed Biden’s upcoming trip to Saudi Arabia, as part of his regional tour, and stressed that this visit is “extremely important for Israel, which is trying to build a more moderate coalition in the Middle East, where it has been needed for a long time,” according to the newspaper ‘The Times of Israel’.

Biden began on Wednesday a tour of the Middle East that will take him for the first time since he took office to Israel and the West Bank, where he plans to reiterate his “strong support” for the two-state solution to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and which will also include a stopover in Saudi Arabia.