Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country is on the "cusp" of reviving diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, as he addressed the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Friday.
Netanyahu said agreements in 2020 to establish formal ties with three other Arab states had already "heralded the dawn of a new age of peace."
"But I believe that we are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough — an historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia."
"Such a peace will go a long way to ending the Arab-Israeli conflict. It will encourage other Arab states to normalize their relations with Israel," he said.
Netanyahu firmly rejected Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas's words in his own U.N. speech on Thursday, that there could be no peace in the Middle East without a Palestinian state.
U.S. President Joe Biden's administration has been leading talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia, whose crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, recently said that the two sides were getting closer.
Israel in 2020 established relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, its first normalization with the Arab world in decades after making peace with neighboring Egypt and Jordan.
He made a veiled threat of nuclear attack if Iran pursued its own atomic bomb.
"Above all — above all — Iran must face a credible nuclear threat. As long as I'm prime minister of Israel, I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons," Netanyahu said.
Israel has a widely known but undeclared nuclear program.
Tehran denies seeking a nuclear bomb but has breached limits on uranium enrichment set in a U.S.-brokered 2015 deal following former president Donald Trump's withdrawal from the agreement and reimposition of sweeping sanctions.
