As US President Joe Biden visits the Middle East this week, one issue on the table is to be the status of two small Red Sea islands that are uninhabited, but of key strategic value.
Resolving the tricky status that stems from their location and turbulent history would help build trust between Israel and Saudi Arabia, two US allies taking gradual steps that Washington hopes could one day lead to diplomatic ties.
For now, the two barren islands — Tiran and Sanafir — are home only to soldiers of a decades-old multinational peacekeeping force, their waters occasionally visited by divers for their coral reefs.
Photo: AFP
However, the islands have been fought over in the past, thanks to their key location at the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba, featuring Jordan’s only seaport of the same name and Israel’s Eilat harbor.
Egypt ceded the islands, east of its resort town Sharm El-Sheikh, to Saudi Arabia in 2016, but the deal still requires Israel’s approval, at a time when the Jewish state and Saudi Arabia have no formal ties.
A senior Israeli official said on Thursday that the country would have “no objection” to greenlighting Egypt handing over the islands to Saudi Arabia as a step toward any normalization of ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
The issue is set to be on the agenda yesterday when Biden, after his Israel visit, was to meet Gulf leaders in Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah for a conference where Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was also expected.
Tiran — which hosts an airstrip for the peacekeepers — measures about 61km2, while Sanafir, to the east, is only about half that size.
The islands were under Egyptian sovereignty from 1950, but invaded by Israeli troops during the 1956 Suez Crisis that came after then-Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal.
Nasser’s 1967 closure of the Strait of Tiran, which cut off maritime access to Eilat and Aqaba, precipitated the Six Day War, after which Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula and the two islands.
In 1979, the Camp David peace agreement provided for Egypt to recover the territories. As part of the Sinai’s demilitarization, Cairo was not allowed to station troops on the islands, where only peacekeepers for the Multinational Force and Observers were to be based.
In 2016 a Cairo-Riyadh agreement ceded the islands to Saudi Arabia in a controversial decision that sparked nationalist protests in Egypt, which were quickly stifled.
Critics accused al-Sisi of ceding the islands in return for Saudi Arabian aid and investment largesse. The Egyptian government has said that the islands were originally Saudi Arabian, but leased to Egypt in the 1950s.
The country’s courts handed down a series of contradictory rulings before the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the handover.
However, because the issue is governed by the Camp David agreement, the status of the islands has yet to be finalized, requiring Israel to ratify the transfer.
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