Israel and Sudan are moving forward with normalization, both country’s foreign ministries said Thursday evening following a visit on Thursday to Sudan by Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, where he met in Khartoum with General Abdel-Fattah Al-Burhan, the head of Sudan’s Sovereign Council.
“It has been agreed to move forward towards the normalization of relations between the two countries,” the Sudan’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
At a news conference upon his arrival back in Israel late Thursday night, Cohen said that Israel and Sudan “finalized the text” of a normalization agreement. “Today’s visit to Sudan laid the foundations for a historic peace agreement with a strategic Arab and Muslim country,” he also said.
Sudan had initially said in 2020 that it would sign on to the Abraham Accords normalization agreement. In January 2021, Sudan said that its then-justice minister Nasredeen Abdulbari had signed the accords during a visit by US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, though no documentation of this was ever presented.
The deal inked on Thursday reportedly will be signed later this year when there is a transfer of power from the military, which has run the country since the October 2021 coup led by Burhan, to a civilian government.