Prime Minister of Morocco Saad-Eddine El Othmani. Photo: Beto Barata/PR.

i24 News – Morocco’s prime minister — whose country normalized ties with Israel in 2020 as part of the flowering of peace engendered through the Abraham Accords — reportedly sent a congratulatory letter to Hamas’ political bureau chief.

Saad-Eddine El Othmani, who has been Moroccan premier since 2017, reportedly wrote to Ismail Haniyeh congratulating the Gaza-based terrorist group on “victory” over the “Zionist entity” in the recent fighting between Israel and the Gaza Strip, reported the Times of Israel.

El Othmani extended his “warmest congratulations” on “the victory achieved by the Palestinian people and the supreme resistance after the ceasefire agreement between the factions of the resistance and the Zionist entity,” according to Israeli outlet Ynet.

In 2020, Morocco became the third Muslim Arab state to normalize ties with Israel — following the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The Jewish state has a sizeable Moroccan diaspora, composed of refugees and their descendants, forced to flee Morocco in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In return for Morocco’s willingness to establish full diplomatic ties with the Jewish state — with each country still to officially open embassies — then-President Donald Trump acquiesced to Rabat’s demand to acknowledge its sovereignty over Western Sahara.

It is not unknown for political actors — even ones whose countries have agreed to peace deals with Israel — to publicly leak information about contact with the Jewish state’s enemies as a way of reinforcing their domestic political bona fides.