An Israeli delegation headed by Foreign Minister Eli Cohen visited Khartoum on Thursday and met with Sudan’s military leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in Khartoum, Sudanese authorities confirmed.
The pair discussed “ways to establish fruitful relations” between the two countries and “prospects of cooperation” in security, agriculture, energy, health, water and education, according to a statement by Sudan’s sovereign council.
Cohen was slated to land back in Israel later in the evening and hold a press conference about the trip, which his office called a “historic diplomatic visit.”
Israel and Sudan agreed in 2020 to take steps to normalize ties following such agreements with the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco under the Abraham Accords, but Jerusalem and Khartoum have since struggled to finalize any deal.
Cohen’s trip to Sudan came a day after an Israeli official told Hebrew media outlets that US diplomats in the region with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken informed Israeli counterparts that Sudan was readying to finalize an agreement to join the Abraham Accords, the framework agreement under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco also normalized ties with Israel.
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The official said meetings had been held in recent weeks between Sudanese and Israeli officials, at the urging of the US, paving the way for the deal to be revived.
Sudan initially announced it was ready to join the Abraham Accords as part of a deal that was also meant to net the financially struggling country with US aid and removal from Washington’s state-sponsored terror blacklist.
However, Khartoum never signed the full accords, amid a disagreement between the country’s military and civilian leadership over whether to normalize with Israel. Doing so would end decades of enmity from one of Israel’s bitterest enemies, which famously hosted a 1967 summit at which the Arab League adopted its policy of refusal to engage with Jerusalem.
While the military junta now running the country had backed normalization, the effort was put on the back burner and in May last year, the US cut aid to Sudan in response to the coup, further setting back the initiative.
