Iranian President Hassan Rouhani hit back at the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain for signing historic peace treaties with Israel this week.
Rouhani said during a Wednesday Cabinet meeting that the two Gulf countries would bear the “consequences” of normalizing relations with Israel, which he said is “committing more crimes in Palestine every day.”
“Some of the region’s countries, their people are pious Muslims, but their rulers neither understand religion nor (their) debt … to the nation of Palestine, to their brothers speaking their language,” Rouhani said, according to the Times of Israel. “How could you reach out your hands to Israel? And then you want to give them bases in the region? All the severe consequences that would arise from this are on you.”
The remarks come a day after officials from the UAE and Bahrain joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump to sign the U.S.-brokered normalization agreements. The UAE and Bahrain join Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) as the only Arab nations to have inked peace deals with Israel.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei previously trashed the agreements when the UAE first agreed to sign on and said that “the Emiratis will be disgraced forever” because of the signing. Hamas, a terrorist group that exerts control over the Gaza Strip, has also derided the pacts and fired rockets into southern Israel in response.
“The normalization agreements between Bahrain, the UAE, and the Zionist entity are not worth the paper they were written on,” Hamas said in a Tuesday statement.
