US President Trump said on Thursday that a deal for the U.S. to develop a civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia will require the Arab kingdom to normalize relations with Israel. That marked an unexpected turn — the day after the administration announced the signing of the agreement without mentioning that precondition.
President Trump said in an online post that the deal “will be approved, but is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” referring to U.S.-brokered agreements between Israel and some countries in the Middle East and elsewhere. He said the agreement pertains only to a civil, non-military nuclear program.
Saudi Arabia did not immediately comment on the latest condition, and it was unclear how this might affect the initial deal signed Wednesday. The Saudi kingdom has long insisted it would not normalize relations with Israel until there was a clear pathway to establish a Palestinian state.
Israel’s government swiftly reacted to Trump’s new social media post. “Saudi Arabia’s joining of the Abraham Accords would be an historic leap forward for peace in the Middle East. Peace through Strength,” the Israeli prime minister’s office said in an online statement.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Thursday that Saudi recognition of Israel would be a significant step towards peace in the Middle East.
The United States and Saudi Arabia announced a landmark deal the previous day to establish a civilian nuclear programme in the kingdom, which President Donald Trump said would be contingent on Riyadh normalising relations with Israel.
“Saudi Arabia’s joining of the Abraham Accords would be a historic leap forward for peace in the Middle East”, Netanyahu’s office said after Trump’s announcement.
“The joint American and Israeli military action against the genocidal regime in Tehran and Israel’s crushing of Iran’s terror axis have created the possibility to expand the circle of peace.”
The Abraham Accords are a series of US-brokered normalisation agreements signed during Trump’s first term, under which Israel established formal diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain for the first time, followed by Morocco.
Sudan also signed on to the accords, but later descended into civil war and has never ratified or implemented them.
The deal marked a break from the long-standing position in Arab countries that normalisation with Israel should wait until a Palestinian state was established. The accords were widely framed as reshaping regional alignments around shared concerns about Iran rather than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Saudi Arabia, the region’s largest economy and home to Islam’s two holiest sites, has so far stayed out of the accords.
Riyadh has maintained that it will not normalise relations with Israel without a clear path to Palestinian statehood.
But the kingdom has long been seen as the most consequential potential addition to the Abraham Accords, with negotiations advancing at various points before stalling.
Just days before Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, US officials said talks on Saudi-Israeli normalisation were making progress.
