MANAMA: Bahrain’s crown prince, Sheikh Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held talks on the telephone on Tuesday, a week after their countries signed a normalisation accord.

They “reviewed potential areas of bilateral cooperation and relevant regional and international developments”, the Gulf state’s BNA news agency said.

The prince said the Sept 15 deal, signed in Washington at the same time as an Israel-UAE normalisation agreement, would “strengthen regional security, stability and prosperity”, BNA reported.

Netanyahu travelled to the US capital for a ceremony to sign the deals along with the foreign affairs chiefs of the two Arab monarchies of the Gulf.

In Israel, the prime minister’s office said in a statement that Netanyahu and the crown prince had “a very friendly discussion”.

“We talked of the means to rapidly boost the contents of the accord between our two countries, to transform this peace into an economic, technological, touristic peace, peace in each of these sectors,” Netanyahu said, according to the statement.

Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates became the third and fourth Arab countries to normalise ties with Israel, following Jordan’s 1994 peace treaty with the Jewish state and Egypt’s peace deal in 1979.

The Palestinians have condemned the US-brokered Gulf deals with Israel as “a stab in the back” for their aspirations to establish an independent state of their own.

Published in Dawn, September 23rd, 2020