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In his country’s first reaction to the US decision, Prime Minister Abdul Aziz Jarad said that there are “challenges around the country,” noting that there are threats on the country’s borders that “the Zionist entity has reached.”
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Morocco had agreed to normalize relations, in the fourth such Arab-Israeli agreement in four months. As part of the agreement, the United States will recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara region.
The White House said in a statement that the United States would recognize the kingdom’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, a region that was previously under Spanish occupation and was the subject of a long-standing dispute that has confused international negotiators for decades.
And the White House announced that Trump “reaffirmed his support for Morocco’s serious, reliable and realistic autonomy proposal as the only basis for a just and lasting solution to the conflict over the Western Sahara territories, and as such the president recognized sovereignty Moroccan over the entire territory of Western Sahara “.
Morocco claims sovereignty over the former Spanish colony, as well as the Polisario Front, which has the backing of Algeria, its neighbor Rabat, and its main regional rival. The UN-led negotiations to find a solution for the region have stalled since the spring of 2019.
In mid-November, Morocco, which controls two-thirds of Western Sahara, its seafront, rich in fish and phosphate reserves, reinforced its presence by sending its forces to a United Nations-controlled buffer zone, with the aim of securing the sole road to West Africa in the far south.
Since then, the situation has been tense, after the Polisario Front, backed by Algeria and demanding the independence of the Sahara, violated the ceasefire agreement signed in 1991 under the auspices of the United Nations.
