Senior UAE official: Warm peace with Israel ‘could turn cold’ if Gaza war drags on
Remarks to ToI further indicate Abraham Accords countries aren’t weighing severing ties, but suggest relations may become similar to the chilly ones Israel has with Egypt, Jordan
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
A senior United Arab Emirates official warned Wednesday that a dragged-out war in Gaza risks turning Abu Dhabi’s nascent relations with Israel into a “cold peace.”
“The longer this goes on, the more isolated Israel will be. Even warm peace could eventually turn to cold peace,” the official told The Times of Israel on condition of anonymity.
The warning appeared to be the sternest that Israel has received since the war’s outbreak from any of its Abraham Accords partners — the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco — which normalized relations with Jerusalem less than four years ago.
The comments indicate that the UAE is not considering severing ties with Israel but that those relations could become similar to the ones Israel has with Egypt and Jordan.
The latter two countries made peace with Israel decades ago, but those ties are largely held at the government level, with Amman and Cairo preferring to keep them at a low profile, as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become more intractable.
The normalization agreements with Abraham Accords countries — particularly the UAE — have been far deeper from the outset, with over a million Israelis visiting the Emirates and over $5 billion in trade.
High-level governmental ties regressed following the establishment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline government in December 2022 and have all but halted since the war. Israel has continued to operate its embassy in Abu Dhabi, though public events and meetings have subsided.
Netanyahu has spoken several times since October 7 with UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed, but in their last call, the prime minister pressed the Emirati leader for Abu Dhabi to pay unemployment stipends for the Palestinian workers Jerusalem has barred from returning to jobs in Israel, according to an Israeli official, confirming an Axios report. Bin Zayed rejected the idea outright, shocked by the audacity of the request.
Still, Emirati presidential adviser Anwar Gargash pushed back this month against the idea of cutting ties with Israel over the war, explaining that forging relations in the first place was a “strategic decision” made for the long haul, with the understanding that there would be bumps along the road.
That same phrase — “strategic decision” has been used by Jordanian, Egyptian, Bahraini and Moroccan officials who spoke with The Times of Israel in recent weeks, indicating that normalizing relations with Jerusalem was part of a broader regional approach and they are not looking to abandon it.
Two Arab officials clarified, though, that moves by Israel to displace Palestinians en masse would change that calculus.
At least 25,700 Gazans have been killed so far in the war, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said Wednesday, an unverified figure which is believed to include close to 10,000 Hamas operatives Israel said it has killed during fighting in the Strip. A further 1,000 terrorists were killed in Israel on October 7.
Two hundred and nineteen IDF soldiers have been killed in the Gaza ground offensive.
Israel launched its offensive on Hamas following the terror group’s murderous rampage through communities and a music festival in southern Israel, in which it killed close to 1,200 people and took another 253 hostages, 132 of whom are believed to be still held captive in Gaza.
