Normalization: Netanyahu secretly visited Saudi Arabia and met with Muhammad bin Salman and Mike Pompeo, according to Israeli media

So far, no comment has been issued on the matter by the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, nor by the US embassy in Jerusalem.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published data related to air traffic monitoring indicating that a business jet had made a flight from Tel Aviv to the Neom region, northwest of Saudi Arabia, on the coast of the Red Sea, where it was scheduled to Mohammed bin Salman and Pompeo met on Sunday.

Pompeo is trying to persuade the Saudis to follow the path recently taken by the Arab countries, namely the Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, and to establish official relations with Israel.

Saudi Arabia, in return, had allowed Israeli planes to cross its airspace to reach the Gulf and Asian stations.

Israel concluded two normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and weeks later, United States President Donald Trump announced Sudan’s approval of normalization with Israel, along with the announcement to remove Sudan from the list. from states that sponsor terrorism.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after that announcement that “the three normalization agreements with the Arab countries ended Israel’s geographic isolation by providing shorter and cheaper flights.”

“We are changing the map of the Middle East,” Netanyahu added at a press conference, pointing to a whiteboard with flight path charts.

Netanyahu said at the time: “There will be more countries.”

After the standardization agreements were signed with the UAE and Bahrain, speculation spread on social media that Saudi Arabia would soon catch up on the standardization train.

This was after the broadcast of episodes of an interview on Al Arabiya TV with former Saudi intelligence chief and former Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, in which he harshly criticized Palestinian leaders for criticizing recent moves. of peace of the Gulf states with Israel.

“This low level of rhetoric is not what we expect from officials seeking international support for their cause,” Prince Bandar said in the interview, which was broadcast in three parts.

“It is totally unacceptable that (Palestinian leaders) overlook the leaders of the Gulf states with reprehensible speech,” he added.

Palestinian leaders initially described the normalization of relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain as a “betrayal” and a “stab in the back.”