A senior Azerbaijani official met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem to discuss furthering bilateral ties and regional developments, Azerbaijan’s Embassy in Tel Aviv said on Wednesday.
The top-level meeting comes amid burgeoning ties between the Jewish State and the predominantly Shi’ite Muslim country.
Netanyahu’s tête-à-tête Tuesday with the Assistant to the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Hikmet Hajiyev, who is on his second mission to Israel in the last three months, comes amid a regional shakeup in the wake of the 15-month-long war against Hamas in Gaza, and the weakening of Iran’s terror proxies.
JNS has learned that Hajiyev’s previous visit to Israel in December, during which he met Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, was followed by a stop in Azerbaijan’s longtime ally Turkey, which has been a vociferous critic of Israel during the war.
For Israel, ties with Azerbaijan—which shares a 428-mile border with Iran, a country that is home to tens of millions of Azerbaijanis—are of strategic importance, both as a conduit for reconnaissance and because it supplies over a third of the Jewish state’s oil.
At the same time, Azerbaijan is a leading purchaser of Israeli military hardware, which helped Baku in its 2020 war with archrival Armenia.