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By: World Israel News Staff & JNS
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi slammed ongoing negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia aimed at achieving a peace agreement.
“Normalizing relations with the Zionist regime is a reactionary and regressive move by any government in the Islamic world,” Raisi said during the International Islamic Unity Summit in Tehran.
“The only option for all the fighters in the occupied land and the Islamic world is to resist and stand against the enemies,” Raisi continued, stressing the importance of Jerusalem being “liberated” from Israeli sovereignty.
The Iranian leader criticized the Saudis for what he implied was weakness on the part of the Gulf Kingdom.
“No concerned people in Palestine, Lebanon, and other Islamic countries are talking about compromise,” he said.
The Islamic world should focus on “resistance and standing against the enemy,” Raisi said, which will ultimately lead to Israeli defeat.
While speaking to the media at the United Nations General Assembly in September, Raisi said any “relationships between regional countries and the Zionist regime would be a stab in the back of the Palestinians.”
An historic normalization agreement between Jerusalem and Riyadh, brokered by the U.S., appears to be on the horizon.
U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Friday that the Jewish State and Gulf Kingdom already have a basic framework in place for a peace deal.
“All sides have hammered out, I think, a basic framework for what, you know, what we might be able to drive at,” Kirby said.
“ As in any complex arrangement, as this will inevitably be, everybody is going to have to do something. And everybody is going to have to compromise on some things,” he added.
Last week, Tourism Minister Haim Katz became the first Israeli Cabinet minister to be granted an entry visa by the Saudi government, arriving in Riyadh to participate in a conference of the United Nations World Tourism Organization.
On Sunday, JNS reported that Israeli Communication Minister Shlomo Karhi is scheduled to travel to Saudi Arabia next week, the second visit by an Israeli minister to the Gulf Kingdom in as many weeks, Israeli officials said on Thursday.
The back-to-back ministerial trips to Riyadh are the latest indication that a normalization deal between the two countries, seen as increasingly likely in the coming months, is indeed in the offing.
The communications minister, a Likud Party Knesset member and close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is to attend a global conference of the Universal Postal Union in Riyadh, which he is slated to address.
Karhi, who is to be accompanied on the trip by fellow Likud MK David Bitan, the chair of the Knesset Economic Committee, is also expected to hold bilateral meetings with his Saudi colleagues during his trip.
Saudi officials have even tried to make special arrangements for Karhi, who is religious and will be traveling to Saudi Arabia over the week-long Jewish holiday of Sukkot, when observant Jews eat and even sleep in temporary outdoor booths known as sukkahs.
His visit comes just months after news that a communications corridor connecting Asian and Arab countries with Europe and the West through Israel is expected to be constructed in cooperation with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, in the latest sign of growing regional ties.
