Middle East Monitor / June 27, 2020
The Israeli Ministry of Health considers that scientific and medical cooperation with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) transcends historical challenges in the region.
“The private sector companies in the UAE federation signed a contract with Israeli companies to develop research and technology related to the coronavirus,” announced Hezi Levi, the director general of the Israeli Ministry of Health, in a joint statement with the UAE announcement.
Levi added: “Amid the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in the world and its impact on all countries, the current need is to work immediately to find a solution to this virus in the interest of all humanity.”
He further explained: “Accordingly, private companies in the UAE and Israel started to cooperate in the medical path to fight the pandemic. Scientific and medical cooperation is above the historical and political challenges in the region, which confirms that humanity is the top priority, in order to find a solution to this virus that endangers all countries worldwide.”
On Thursday, the UAE announced the launch of joint projects in the medical field. This came following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements on Thursday, in which he revealed “cooperation” with the UAE, in the field of fighting the coronavirus.
There are no formal diplomatic relations between the UAE and Israel, but there is a strong normalisation processes that has existed for years between the two sides.
The UAE is attempting to use the pandemic to increase the pace of its normalisation with Israel at the expense of the Palestinian issue, which is passing through the most difficult crisis in its history since the Nakba of 1948
During recent weeks, two Emirati planes landed at Ben-Gurion airport in the city of Tel Aviv, alleging that they had transported aid to the Palestinians, but the Palestinian Authority refused to receive them for lack of coordination in advance.
Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot revealed that an Emirati plane loaded with 100,000 coronavirus scanners landed in Tel Aviv on 26 March 2020.
