Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid will travel to Bahrain on Thursday to inaugurate the new embassy in the capital, Manama, part of US-sponsored normalization accords with Israel.
Lapid will meet with his Bahraini counterpart, Abdullatif Al Zayani, and sign bilateral agreements during his visit, according to a statement from the Foreign Ministry.
Lapid’s one day visit will be the first official Israeli ministerial to the country since normalizing ties with the Israeli state more than a year ago, paving the way for future trade and partnerships’ deals.
He announced his visit during the conference call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and officials from Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco, which signed U.S.-brokered agreements to normalize ties with Israel last year.
Lapid will be accompanied, during his visit, by his Foreign Ministry Director-General Alon Ushpiz and Deputy-Director General for Middle Eastern Affairs and the Peace Process Oded Joseph.
Bahraini foreign minister, Abdellatif al-Zayani, visited Israel, for the first time, last year, when he was welcomed at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport by his Israeli counterpart, at the time, Gabi Ashkenazi.
Bahrain’s first ambassador to Israel, Khaled Yousif Al-Jalahma, took up his new post in Tel Aviv earlier this month, as the Israeli Eitan Na’eh was nominated as Israel’s first ambassador to Bahrain.
The UAE opened, this year, an embassy in Tel Aviv as Israel has inaugurated one in Abu Dhabi. Israel and Morocco are similarly expected to mutual open embassies in their capitals, according to their Foreign ministers last public statements.
Sudan, however, has lagged behind in the normalization process, as it didn’t attend the one anniversary meeting held earlier this month, between” the Abraham Accords club’s members,” as Lapid called it.
After more than one year of Arab states crossing the redline that was always feared and establishing ties and partnerships with Israel, Palestinians still view the agreements as a betrayal of the Palestinian national cause and a negligence of the violations of international laws that Palestinian people experience every day.
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