US President Donald Trump he said that Sudan will recognize Israel, becoming the third major Muslim-majority country to do so, after the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Trump sealed the deal during a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, and Sudanese General Abdel Fattah al Burhan, head of the Military Council. Israel and Sudan they said in a joint statement that their first reports will be on the economic and trade front, initially focusing on agriculture.
Trump has long been lobbying Sudan to recognize Israel, also promising economic aid and removal from the terrorist list of countries he has been on since 1993. Trump announced Monday that he would remove the country from the list as soon as he filed 335 million dollars that he had promised in compensation to the victims of the attacks carried out by al Qaeda on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Sudan only emerged last year from the thirty-year dictatorship of Omar al Bashir and its government is still under the protection of a military council linked to the old regime. Sudanese authorities had begun to negotiate last year to remove the country from the list and thus unlock the possibility of receiving billions of dollars in urgently needed international aid and loans.
The Trump administration considers pushing the Emirates and Bahrain to enter into diplomatic relations with Israel as one of its biggest foreign policy successes, and the president is in a hurry to get more similar results ahead of the November elections. In mid-September, during a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said that “at least five or six countries” are about to recognize Israel after the first two. The greatest success would be Saudi Arabia: if the major Sunni power – which guards the mosques of Mecca and Medina – decided to recognize Israel, it would be a novelty of enormous importance for the entire Muslim world. This possibility, however, seems further away at the moment.
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