A Sudanese protester holds a national flag as he stands on a barricade along a street, demanding that the country’s Transitional Military Council hand over power to civilians, in Khartoum, Sudan June 5, 2019. Photo: Reuters / Stringer.

i24 News – The normalization agreement between Israel and Sudan signed on October 23 could be at risk of unraveling, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

According to reports, Khartoum agreed to sign a deal with Jerusalem in exchange for being taken off Washington’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, a move which has already begun.

However, the Times reports that Sudan has marked the end of 2020 as the deadline to be taken off the list — subject to approval by the US Congress — or else the normalization process would be put on hold.

“The whole thing felt forced all along by an administration that wanted to use a terrorism designation as a political tool to try to get normalization with Israel,” director of the Middle East Security program at the Center for a New American Security Ilan Goldenberg told the Times.

“When you cook up these kinds of very transactional deals with unrelated items that don’t make much sense, this sometimes happens,” he added.

As long as Sudan remains on the terrorism sponsors list, foreign investors may be reluctant to invest in the crisis-hit African nation, now receiving tens of thousands of Ethiopian refugees due to a civil war raging across the border.

In a recent conversation between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Sudan’s transitional government, the latter clarified that the deal with Israel will not move forward until Congress votes to remove Khartoum from the blacklist, according to the Times.