MANAMA (Dispatches) –
Zionist war minister Benny Gantz has arrived in Bahrain on an unannounced visit, the first official visit by a war minister of the occupying regime since the two sides established diplomatic relations in 2020.
The two-day visit by Benny Gantz is scheduled to include meetings with top Bahrain defense officials and Bahraini leaders, the occupying regime’s ministry of war said.
Gantz’s office said he was joined on the trip by a number of top Zionist officials, including the commander of the regime’s navy. Bahrain is also the strategically located home port for the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet.
Bahrain was among four Arab regimes that joined the so-called Abraham Accords, a series of pacts with the Zionist regime brokered by the Trump administration.
For years, the occupying regime and Bahrain maintained clandestine security ties. Since the agreement, they have opened embassies, signed a series of agreements and established direct flights and business ties.
Normalization with the occupying regime remains a contentious issue for Bahraini people.
A Bahraini rights group has rebuked the Bahraini regime for its heavy-handed crackdown on opponents of normalization with the occupying regime after the inauguration of the regime’s embassy in the tiny Persian Gulf kingdom.
In a recent report published by Bahrain Forum for Human Rights, the group recorded human rights violations committed by the Al Khalifah regime in late September and October against Bahrainis who opposed normalization with Israel.
Following the inauguration of the Israeli embassy in Bahrain on September 30, anti-normalization protests intensified across the tiny kingdom, especially in the neighborhood of Ras Rumman in the capital Manama, the group said.
At the time, the report said, calls for peaceful demonstrations or expressions of popular rejection against the opening of the Zionist embassy in Bahrain spread from various parties.
Last September, Bahrain’s main opposition group, the al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, denounced Manama’s normalization of relations with the regime as “a crime,” emphasizing that the Al Khalifah regime’s policies did not conform to the will of the Bahraini nation.