Building on bilateral ties that were established five years ago, Chad will open an embassy in Israel on Thursday, according to the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The statement was made on Wednesday when Chadian President Mahamat Deby‘s administration announced that he was visiting Israel for a 48-hour state visit but gave no other information.
The Chadian president would preside at the opening of the embassy, according to Netanyahu’s office.
Chad terminated diplomatic connections with Israel in 1972 after the Organisation of African Unity, the forerunner of the present-day African Union, ordered its member states to do so in support of the Palestinians.
But in November 2018, Idriss Deby, the late father of the current president of Chad, paid a historic visit to Israel and pledged a new era of collaboration between the two nations.
The next year, Israel inked normalisation pacts with Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates as part of a larger diplomatic effort by the United States under President Donald Trump. Netanyahu then paid a visit to Chad.
The agreements infuriated Palestinians, who denounced them as a “stab in the back” out of concern that they would undermine a long-standing pan-Arab position calling for Israeli withdrawal from territories it illegally occupies and acceptance of a Palestinian statehood in exchange for normal relations with Arab nations.
The location of the Chadian embassy was not immediately known. Tel Aviv is home to embassies for most nations.
Trump stirred some controversy in 2017 when he declared he would move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and he did it in actuality one year later. International censure was sparked by the action, which infuriated Palestinians.
Previous US presidents and nearly all other world leaders have postponed establishing embassies in Jerusalem until Israeli-Palestinian discussions have established the city’s ultimate status. The capital of the future state for the Palestinians is seen as being in occupied East Jerusalem.