Sudan agreed to designate Hezbollah as a terror organization as part of its US-brokered agreement to normalize relations with Israel, a senior US official said Friday.
The issue was not mentioned in the joint statement from Israel, Sudan and the US released by the White House on the normalization agreement, and no comment was immediately available from Khartoum.
The move would mark a dramatic shift for Sudan, which was a staunch ally of Iran until 2016, helping the Islamic Republic smuggle rockets and other weapons to Hamas in Gaza. This prompted Israel to repeatedly bomb military facilities in Sudan, according to foreign reports.
Sudan would be following the lead of Estonia and Guatemala, which both took official action against Hezbollah this week.
Guatemala on Friday declared Hezbollah a terrorist organization, agreed to bar the group’s operatives from its territory and “to fight against financing” Hezbollah , Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu said on Thursday that Hezbollah posed “a considerable threat to international — and thereby Estonian — security.”
His ministry stated that entry to Estonia will be prohibited for “Hezbollah affiliates about whom there is information or there are reasonable grounds to believe that their activity supports terrorism and who therefore pose a threat to the Estonian as well as international security.”
A separate statement noted that the ban applied to members of both Hezbollah’s political and military wings if they were involved in terror activities.
US President Donald Trump announced the Israel-Sudan deal on Friday at the White House.
Trump said he would remove Sudan from the blacklist on Monday after Sudan followed through on its pledge to deliver $335 million to compensate American victims of past terror attacks and their families.
The money is meant for victims of the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by the al-Qaeda network while its leader, Osama bin Laden, was living in Sudan.
AP
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