Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita said Sunday in an interview with the Israeli Occupation newspaper, "Yedioth Ahronoth," that relations between Morocco and the Israeli Occupation were "already normal" before the normalization agreement announced Thursday by US President Donald Trump.

"From our point of view, we are not talking about normalization because relations were originally normal, we are talking about a resumption of relations between the two countries as they were before, because the relationship has always existed."

Thursday, the outgoing US President Donald Trump announced his country's recognition of Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara, the disputed former Spanish colony, and an agreement to normalize relations between Morocco and the Israeli Occupation, which was also welcomed by Israeli Occupation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Since Saturday, the United States has adopted a "new official map" for Morocco that includes Western Sahara, whose sovereignty has been contested for decades in Rabat, and the separatists of the Polisario Front backed by Algeria.

Morocco, which established formal relations with the Israeli Occupation in the late 1990s after the Oslo agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis, is the fourth Arab country this year to announce an agreement to normalize relations with the Hebrew state, after the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan.

In the interview, Bourita stressed, "The relations between Israel and Morocco are distinguished and cannot be compared to the relationship that binds Israel to any other Arab country."

He added, "Morocco has an important history with the Jewish community, a special history in the Arab world. The king ... and the previous kings, including Hassan II, respected and protected the Jews. Relations between Morocco and the Jews were distinguished relations that cannot be found in any other Arab country." 

While the Israeli Occupation political class and press welcomed the agreement between Morocco and the Israeli Occupation, which provides for the establishment of a direct air route between the two countries, Palestinians condemned it, with Hamas calling the agreement a 'political sin.'