UAE to Israel: ‘We’ll cut ties over Judea, Samaria annexation’

An Emirati diplomat urged Washington to intervene and prevent annexation, warning it would undo the normalization deal brokered under President Trump.

By World Israel News Staff

A senior United Arab Emirates diplomatic official warned that if Israel were to pursue official annexation of Judea and Samaria, the Gulf kingdom would withdraw from the historic Abraham Accords peace agreements.

“Annexation would be a red line for my government, and that means there can be no lasting peace. It would foreclose the idea of regional integration and be the death knell of the two-state solution,” Lana Nusseibeh, assistant minister for political affairs and special envoy for UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed, told The Times of Israel on Tuesday.

Nusseibah called on Washington to ensure that Israel does not move ahead with annexing swaths of the territory, saying such a step would undo the regional normalization brokered by President Donald Trump.

The UAE trusts that “Trump will not allow the Abraham Accords, the tenet of his legacy, to be tarnished, threatened or derailed by extremists and radicals,” she said.

According to Nusseibah, the Emirati government believes Trump and his administration “have many of the levers to lead the initiative for a wider integration of Israel into the region.”

She stressed that the Emirates has never considered reversing normalization with Israel, despite international tensions sparked by the ongoing war in Gaza.

“When Hamas tried to derail the Abraham Accords vision of regional integration with the October 7 terror attacks, we were firm in our response,” she said, noting that the UAE swiftly condemned the massacres.

But Nusseibah warned that annexation would leave her country no choice but to walk back its ties with Israel.

“There is an outstretched hand, despite all of this misery, in the region to Israel,” she told The Times of Israel. “Annexation would withdraw that hand.”