After the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan - will Libya become the fifth country to join the Abrahamic Accords and re-establish relations with Israel?
The political camps in the Arab-African country, which has experienced two brutal civil wars in the last decade, are preparing for an instinctive election campaign that will determine Libya's future.
According to senior Libyan officials close to the leading candidate for the presidency, General Khalifa Haftar, it seems that the Arab state is approaching the normalization of its relations with Israel.
Hefter recently spoke on several occasions about his desire to normalize with Israel, and announced that he would do so if he was elected president in the December 24 elections.
A source at Hefter's headquarters: "Right now, talking about Israel could hurt his chances of winning - because of the traditional hostility of the public in Libya to Israel"
As recently revealed in "Israel Today", the two leading candidates for the presidency have hired the services of the same senior Israeli communications consultant - with extensive experience in conducting election campaigns in countries in Africa, Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
The candidates are General Khalifa Hefter and Saif al-Islam Gaddafi - the son of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed in a lynching by Islamist rebels.
General Khalifa Hefter told his aides that whoever wins the Libyan presidential election will chart the direction in which the state will march: Will tribal wars continue under radical Islamic rule - or will a democratic and liberal regime be established, with the support of the international community One of the largest in the world?
A senior source in the Emirates: "Regarding the normalization of relations with Israel, the two presidential candidates are unanimous and said that they will work harder for this purpose."
Candidate Sif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of dictator, Photo: Reuters
Hefter assigns his son Saddam a senior position in the Libyan government if elected, and has the support of the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Western parties, but it turns out that he also has high hopes for establishing relations with Israel. "He could bring about the implementation of the Libya Rehabilitation Program, which is estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars," he told associates.
He said Libya's aspiration to receive assistance from the international community necessitated a change of direction on the part of the president-elect and the administration to be formed around him.
Joining the Abrahamic Accords may, in his view, pave the way for Libya to return to the family of nations - and thus obtain the necessary assistance, in the form of financial loans from the International Monetary Fund and political-political support from the United States and the European Union.
A senior United Arab Emirates official close to the two leading candidates for Libya's presidency told Israel Today: "And they both expressed themselves in closed conversations with their associates who will work harder for this purpose."
The emirate official added, however, that even if one of the two is elected president and Libya joins the Abrahamic Accords, a fairly different normalization is expected from that which occurred with the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco.
"If the move is implemented," the senior official continued, "it will happen at a very slow pace, due on the thumb side, a bit like the normalization agreement being formed between Israel and Sudan."
A source in Hefter's election headquarters told Israel Today that "it is still too early to talk about a normalization agreement with Israel and what it will look like. First of all, General Hefter will indeed be elected, and we are sure he will be elected. "The future is with Israel, because there is a built-in and traditional hostility among the public in Libya towards it. At the moment, this talk can only harm Hefter's electorate and harm his chances of winning the election."
