Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will not agree to forge formal relations with Israel before Palestinians get a state, a columnist who is close to the royal family wrote Monday.

The message came from Dr. Nawaf Obaid, a former adviser to the Saudi government, in an article for the Palestinian al-Quds newspaper.

The ex-official added that Israel's current policy toward Palestinians was not conducive for Saudi Arabia to seek normalization.

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Obaid said that the crown prince had worked on the Palestinian issue and had been in touch with both sides in the conflict.

"Most of the people in Saudi Arabia still believe that, as the late King Faisal said, the kingdom should be the last Arab and Muslim country to recognize Israel," he wrote. "Some extremists would be outraged if Israel was recognized because they would view this as a betrayal of the values of Islam," he continued. He also conceded that "the door to normalization with Israel has been pened and cannot be fully shut, although it is contingent on Palestinian independence."

He also noted that the Saudi public was still far from supporting the idea of Israeli-Saudi normalization.

While Israel recently normalized ties with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan in the Abraham Accords under the auspices of the Trump administration, Saudi Arabia welcomed the deals but did not follow suit.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has recently said that, if he wins the March 23 parliamentary elections and swears in a new government, he would secure direct flights between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

However, earlier reports suggested that an Israeli-Saudi normalization was unlikely under King Salman bin Abdulaziz.

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i24NEWS contributed to this report.

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The outgoing US administration is to designate Yemen's Houthi movement as a foreign terrorist organization. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the move in a statement late on Sunday. It will include sanctions against the movement and three of its leaders and will come into effect on Jan. 19, the Trump administration's last full day in office.

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Saudi Arabia, which has been attacked by Houthi-launched missiles and drones from Yemen, said the move would "neutralize" the threat posed by the Houthis by depriving them of arms and funds and would bring them back to the negotiating table.

A leader of the Iranian-aligned group, which has been battling a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen since 2015 in a war widely seen as a proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, said it reserved the right to respond.

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There was the refusal to play by the Milwaukee Bucks, something that caught the league – and even the Bucks' would-be opponent Wednesday, the Orlando Magic – by surprise. That led to two other games being called off, and ultimately a three-hour meeting involving players, coaches, and others where some suggested the prudent move would be to end the season.

By Thursday morning, cooler heads prevailed, and players decided to continue the playoffs.

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Grossman's 2014 novel describes a surreal stand-up performance in which an aging comic uses the performance to take a look at his life and reveal some chilling information about his past. It is told from the point of view of one of the audience members, an old acquaintance of the comic who was invited out of the blue to see him on stage.

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In 2017, the book was adapted into a play for The Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv. The play won a prize for the best new Israeli drama and Dror Keren, the actor who played the comic, won a prize for best actor.

Grossman won the Israel Prize for literature in 2018 and the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.

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A German Defense Ministry spokesman said Berlin had no indications of any impending attacks on Western interests by Iran and said that training programs could resume in the coming days.

A Dutch government source also announced a suspension of military training operations, citing an unspecified security threat.

Germany has 160 soldiers involved in training Iraqi forces trying to contain Islamic State militants. The Netherlands has 169 military and civilian personnel in Iraq, including about 50 in Erbil, where they are helping to train Kurdish troops.

Dutch news agency ANP said that Dutch forces have been ordered to remain indoors since Sunday.

Earlier on Wednesday, the U.S. State Department ordered the pullout of some employees from both its embassy in Baghdad and its consulate in Erbil.

The order came as tensions build up between the U.S. and Iran. Washington has applied new sanctions pressure on Tehran and sent additional forces to the Middle East, saying that there was an increased Iranian threat to U.S. interests in the region.

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According to the survey,  79% of Republicans sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians, compared with just 27% of Democrats. It said the partisan divide was the widest it has been since 1978, the earliest year it provided for comparison, when 49% of Republicans and 44% of Democrats sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians.

"Since 2001, the share of Republicans sympathizing more with Israel than the Palestinians has increased 29 percentage points, from 50% to 79%," the center said. "Over the same period, the share of Democrats saying this has declined 11 points, from 38% to 27%."

According to the survey, "42% say U.S. President Donald Trump is 'striking the right balance' in the situation in the Middle East, while 30% say he favors Israel too much."

At a similar point in Barack Obama's presidency, 47% of Americans said he had struck a proper balance in dealing with the Middle East; 21% said he sided too much with the Palestinians, while 7% said he favored Israel too much. "Today, nearly half of Democrats (46%) say Trump favors Israel too much, while just 21% say he is striking the right balance," the survey says.

"In 2010, more Republicans said Obama supported the Palestinians too much (38%) than said he struck the right balance."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's leadership is also seen through a partisan lens: Fifty-two percent of Republicans view him favorably, compared to just 18% of Democrats. The share of liberal Democrats who sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians has plummeted from 33% to 19% since 2016 alone, the survey found.

The survey said young people are more divided in their sympathies, with 32% of those under 30 favoring Israel, and 23% favoring the Palestinians. Respondents ages 50 to 64, for instance, favored Israel by a margin of 56% to 12%.

The Pew survey questioned 1,503 people from Jan. 10-15 and had a statistical margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

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