Reports say a Sudanese official is paying a visit to Israel to promote bilateral ties with the regime, despite anti-Israel sentiment among the people of Sudan.
According to Israeli media reports, a representative of Sudan’s ruling council is currently on a visit to the occupied territories.
The visit is reportedly aimed to advance relations between Israel and Sudan.
Israel’s leading daily Haaretz quoted an informed source as saying that the envoy arrived in the occupied territories at the beginning of the week.
According to the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya news website, a Sudanese source said that the official was accompanied by “senior military and intelligence leaders.”
The visit comes a few weeks after an Israeli delegation visited Sudan to meet with Sudan’s military chief and de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
The Sudanese military, led by coup leader Gen. Burhan, seized power last October, after detaining Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and other civilian leaders and dissolving the year-old transitional government as well as the joint ruling military-civilian sovereign council.
He also declared a state of emergency and vowed to form what he called a competent government.
The move drew anger and outrage across the North African country and sparked an international outcry, including from the UN Security Council. The country has been rocked by protests since then.
While the coup has been censured everywhere, the regime in Tel Aviv has chosen to be silent. Experts see it as an approval of the Sudanese military’s actions by the Israeli regime.
Speculation that the coup could have been engineered by the Tel Aviv regime to have a friendlier ruler in Khartoum has been raised after an Israeli regime delegation reportedly visited Sudan shortly after the overthrow of the civilian-led transitional government led by Hamdok.
Hamdok was restored in his post as part of a political deal with military rulers of the restive African country, but he resigned earlier in January amid a political impasse and large-scale protests.
Burhan, according to the Israeli media, had been a more prominent player leading the normalization effort with the Tel Aviv regime.
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Notably, days prior to the coup, a delegation of the Sudanese military officials had also embarked on a visit to Israel, lending further credence to the growing narrative of the secret alliance between them.
Sudan agreed to normalize ties with the Israeli regime in October 2020 as part of the US-led so-called Abraham Accords, a month after the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed similar détente deals with Tel Aviv brokered by the US.
The normalization deals were condemned by Palestine as a brazen betrayal of the Palestinian cause.
However, the development of relations between the two sides has been slower than Israel’s growing ties with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco. An official normalization deal has to go through the Sudanese parliament before it comes into effect.
