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Oman, once thought to be next Abraham Accords signer, criminalizes relations with Israel
(JTA) — Just a few years ago, Oman was expected to be next in line after Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to sign onto the Abraham Accords normalization agreements with Israel.
On Friday, the country’s parliament voted to criminalize any relations or interactions with “the Zionist entity.”
While the exact details have not been made public, the new law seems to be broadly applied.
“The brothers, Your Excellencies, looked at the development taking place, whether it was technical, cultural, economic or sports, and proposed additional amendments that include severing any economic, sports or cultural relations and prohibiting dealing in any way or means, whether it was a real meeting, an electronic meeting or something else,” said Yaqoub Al-Harithi, vice president of the Omani parliament, about the bill, according to Oman’s WAF news agency.
The sultanate at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, where the Indian Ocean meets the Persian Gulf, was for a long time closer with Israel than other states in the region were. Oman never took part in any war with the Jewish state and established unofficial trade relations with Israel in the early 2000s. Omani Sultan Qaboos Bin Said welcomed three Israeli prime ministers to his country: Yitzhak Rabin in 1994, Shimon Peres in 1996 and Benjamin Netanyahu in 2018. Rabin’s visit was the first by an Israeli prime minister to a Gulf nation.
Under Qaboos’ leadership, Oman carved a niche for itself as the Switzerland of the Middle East, able to deal simultaneously with countries such as Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Yemen, all while maintaining a sense of neutrality. The country has been an important middleman in everything from the Iranian nuclear talks to Yemeni Civil War negotiations.
So what happened?
Sultan Qaboos, who was the longest reigning ruler of the Middle East’s oldest independent state, died in 2020 with no heirs. Rulership passed to his cousin Haitham Bin Tariq.
Though Sultan Haitham, upon his inauguration, announced that he would follow in his predecessor’s peace-making footsteps, he has moved closer to Iran, which funds military activity throughout the region.
While Saudi Arabia opened its airspace for Israeli flights earlier this year, Oman has held out on opening its own, blocking the most direct route for some flights from Israel to Asia. In doing so, Oman has received pressure from President Joe Biden’s administration to open its skies.
However, the developments Al-Harithi is referring to in his statement could include the rise of Israel’s new right-wing government, which has already provoked anger well beyond the Middle East. “What also potentially fuels this is a recent call by a number of Arab countries, including the UAE, to go to the United Nations and condemn Israel over the recent rise of [Itamar] Ben-Gvir,” Nir Boms, the director of the Program for Regional Cooperation at the Moshe Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Protesting Israel “remains one of the few unifying factors in the Arab world,” Boms said.
For more Islamist-leaning factions across the region, “The issues around Israel are coming to a point where they need to have a counter-reaction and come back to a boycott policy,” he added.
Another reason may be fear of Iran, which is conducting military exercises off of Oman’s coast and is reeling from months of domestic protest.
“The last thing Muscat wants is for the Gulf to become a battlefield with attacks on western shipping, resulting in the closure of the Straits of Hormuz,” said Tom Gross, a British journalist and Middle East expert. “Oman, like Qatar, is trying to calm Iran. Their message is: ‘We are not the ones rushing to form relations with Israel so don’t take it out on us.’”
Despite the bill, Gross thinks that Omani relations with Israel will continue as they always have, under the table.
“The Omani vote was primarily designed to appease the Iranian regime. There is a feeling in intelligence circles that the counter-revolutionary uprising in Iran has passed the point of no return and as a result the regime in Tehran may try to externalize its domestic problems,” Gross said. “Meanwhile, relations with Israel will likely continue, albeit more quietly.”
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Palestinian Authority TV Denies Holocaust for Second Time in a Month
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Two weeks ago, Palestinian Media Watch exposed that Palestinian Authority (PA) television hosted a journalist who insisted the gas chambers “narrative” could be dismissed with “very simple evidence.”
Now, PA TV has done it again. This time, the channel invited a Syrian journalist who said the war in Gaza is the “real” holocaust while the history of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews is a “game that Israel plays”:
Senior Syrian journalist Mustafa Al-Miqdad: “It is incumbent upon the Palestinians today and those who support them to show the extent of the holocaust and genocide that the Palestinians have experienced for two years and almost a month in the Gaza Strip …
[They] were subjected to this holocaust, the real one- Regarding the Holocaust of the Jews there are many question marks from the Westerners, and not from our side that we deny it. Even from the West in general there are many stories that refute the accuracy of the [Jewish] narrative even if they talk about part of it, they talk about this [lack of] accuracy. This is the game that Israel plays.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals, Nov. 16, 2025]
Antisemitism and demonization of the Jews constitute a core ideology of the Palestinian Authority and pave the way for it to incite and justify terror against Israelis. A key PA strategy towards this end is to delegitimize the Jewish people and their history, while replacing it with a fabricated story.
Whether denying Jewish history in the Land of Israel to brand Jews as “colonialists” — or denying and appropriating the Holocaust — official PA TV consistently broadcasts content designed to cultivate hatred of Jews and Israel.
It is difficult to comprehend how any Western government, particularly France with all that it went through in World War II, can still speak of the Palestinian Authority as reformed or of its chairman as “charting a course toward a horizon of peace” when PA media continues to broadcast shocking forms of Holocaust denial and appropriation.
Yet French President Macron and others insist on rewarding the Palestinians with a state governed by this very PA. Instead of demanding the most basic moral prerequisite for statehood — ending institutional antisemitism — Western leaders turn a blind eye.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.
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Norway Government Budget in Peril Over Oil, Wealth Fund’s Israel Investments
A general view shows Norway’s parliament in Oslo, Norway, Sept. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Tom Little
Norway‘s Labour government failed to win backing for its 2026 draft budget by an end-November deadline but talks will resume in parliament to find a compromise over oil drilling and the wealth fund’s Israeli investments, a negotiator said on Monday.
The Norwegian parliament is due to vote on the budget on Friday, and Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere could be forced to call a vote of confidence if no agreement is reached by then, putting his minority government on the line.
The Labour Party narrowly won a second term in a September election, but the result left it reliant on four small left-wing parties to pass the budget, with only two of those, the agrarian Centre Party and the far-left Red Party, agreeing so far.
“It is surprising this is happening so soon after the election,” Jonas Stein, a political scientist at UiT the Arctic University of Norway, told Reuters.
“The Greens in particular had promised during the election that they would back Stoere as prime minister and now he could fall two-to-three months after the election.”
The climate-focused Green Party, which wants a gradual phaseout of the oil industry by 2040, walked out, as did the Socialist Left over its objections to investments by Norway‘s sovereign wealth fund in Israel.
“We must continue our work to secure a majority for this budget by Friday,” parliament’s finance committee Chair Tuva Moflag of Labour told public broadcaster NRK on Monday.
Stoere has said that Norway, Europe’s biggest supplier of gas and a major oil producer, should continue to explore for hydrocarbons to sustain the country’s biggest industry.
The government also objects to demands that Norway‘s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund should divest from all Israeli firms, arguing that only companies involved in the alleged occupation of Palestinian territories should be excluded.
“Norwegian politics have become a bit more adversarial and a bit more polarized,” Johannes Bergh, a political scientist at the Oslo-based Institute for Social Research, told Reuters.
“It might be more comparable to what’s happening in countries like Belgium or the Netherlands, where the political landscape is very fragmented. It has become very fragmented here as well.”
Parliament is elected for a fixed four-year term, with the next vote due in 2029, making it difficult for parties on the right to challenge Stoere’s government. It is not possible to call early elections or dissolve parliament.
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South Koreans Arrested in Iran on Smuggling Charges, Seoul Says
People walk near a mural of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, amid the Iran-Israel conflict, in Tehran, Iran, June 23, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
South Korean nationals have been arrested in Iran on suspicion of smuggling, South Korea’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Monday, but declined to confirm the number of people arrested.
“Our diplomatic mission team in Iran has been communicating the matter with Iranian officials and will continue to provide necessary consular assistance to the Korean nationals,” the ministry said.
The ministry declined to confirm other details including their occupation or the exact nature of the charges.
Local Yonhap News separately reported two South Korean nationals were arrested, including one who works at a public institution.