Following a nerve-racking 24 hours, Saudi Arabia agreed on Monday to let Israeli airliners cross its airspace en route to the United Arab Emirates after talks between Saudi officials and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, a senior Trump administration official said.
Kushner and Middle East envoys Avi Berkowitz and Brian Hook raised the issue shortly after they arrived in Saudi Arabia for talks. "We were able to reconcile the issue," the official said, adding that it stemmed from unresolved technical issues rather than a principled retraction of already given assurances.
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The agreement was hammered out just hours before Israel's first commercial flight to the UAE was planned on Tuesday morning. The Israir flight was at risk of being canceled with no overflight agreement.
The direct flights are an offshoot of normalization deals Israel reached this year with the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan.
"This should resolve any issues that should occur with Israeli carriers taking people from Israel to the UAE and back and to Bahrain," the official said.
Some 50,000 Israelis are expected to visit the UAE in December and can now do so.
Another American official told Israel Hayom that "the Abraham Accords are a tremendous success for the entire region, but the process of rapprochement between the sides is sometimes complex and intricate. Jared Kushner and Avi Berkowitz worked tirelessly to make the Abraham Accords a warm peace, and this effort included working intimately with all the allies in the US and the region to allow direct flights on a permanent basis."
Kushner and his team were to meet Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman later this week, as well as the emir of Kuwait. One goal of the trip is to try to persuade Gulf Cooperation Council countries to end a three-year blockade of Qatar.
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