Sources: Saudi Crown Prince Asks Israeli PM to Stand against Iran

TEHRAN (FNA)- Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a letter to new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has felicitated him on winning the election, and called for Tel Aviv’s serious confrontation against Iran, sources said.

Informed sources told the Arabic-language Saudi Wikileaks website that Bin Salman has congratulated Bennett on the new post, stressing Riyadh’s commitment to all previous agreements with Tel Aviv.

In his letter, he has expressed the hope that the new Israeli prime minister and his cabinet would seriously pursue Iran’s case and stand against what he claimed as Iran’s danger in the region, they added.

According to the sources, the letter was written after the US declaration of intention to withdraw its military equipment from West Asian region, including Saudi Arabia.

Reports said late last year that the Saudi princes are split in opinions over whether to recognize and normalize relations with Israel, with Bin Salman likely to be open to signing a peace deal with Tel Aviv.

MbS “favours closer ties” with Tel Aviv after two Persian Gulf states, the UAE and Bahrain, officially signed normalisation deals with Israel, The Daily Mail reported in December.

The two Persian Gulf states were followed by two other Arab countries, Sudan and Morocco, which expressed readiness to normalise relations with Israel.

Despite the alleged openness of MbS to the deal, some members of the royal family are said to oppose the move. The crown prince is the country's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence as well as the head of Saudi Arabia’s Council of Political and Security Affairs.

MbS’s cousin, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who was head of the country’s intelligence for more than two decades, has been vocal in his opposition to recognising Israel. Recently, he blasted Tel Aviv as the “last Western colonising power in the Middle East”.

The former General Intelligence chief accused Israel of depicting itself to the world as being a “small, existentially threatened country, surrounded by bloodthirsty killers who want to eradicate her from existence”. He then added that despite this such a country is “professing” that it wants to “be friends” with Riyadh.

Turki also accused Israel of placing Palestinians “in concentration camps under the flimsiest of security accusations”.