Morocco and Israel have agreed to expand military cooperation to include intelligence, air defense and electronic warfare, the Royal Armed Forces Command said in a statement on Tuesday after a joint committee meeting in Rabat.

According to a statement published by the Moroccan News Agency, Farouk Belkhir, Inspector General of the Royal Armed Forces, and Dror Shalom, Director of the Political-Military Affairs Office of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, chaired the meeting in Rabat on Monday. . And on Tuesday, the first meeting of the committee that oversees Moroccan-Israeli defense cooperation.

The two officials agreed to “further strengthen and expand this cooperation to include other areas, particularly intelligence, air defense and electronic warfare,” the statement said. At the meeting, the conversation covered several areas of military cooperation, logistics and training, as well as “acquisition and modernization of equipment”.

The two countries signed a security cooperation agreement in November 2021, angering neighboring Algeria, which severed diplomatic ties with Rabat in the summer of that year amid rising tensions between them over a dispute over Western Sahara. .

A normalization agreement between Morocco and Israel, expected by the end of 2020, included US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, disputed by the Algerian-backed Polisario Front.

The security agreement between Rabat and Tel Aviv also included “cooperation in the field of defense industry and technology transfer”, while different media sources indicated, about two years ago, that Morocco had acquired advanced Israeli weapons, including war without any official confirmation. . from Rabat.