Next week, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meeting is set to readopt a long-standing resolution to make the Middle East a region free of nuclear weapons. The resolution was first adopted in 1974 as a joint Egyptian-Iranian initiative.
The resolution was presented and adopted only four years after the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) went into force in 1970 and only two years after it was opened for signature in 1968.
Egypt and Iran were among the first countries to sign the NPT in 1968. In 1970, Iran ratified the NPT. Egypt ratified it in 1981.
While endorsing the peaceful use of nuclear energy, the NPT calls for the prohibition and disarmament of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in the Middle East, a goal that has been difficult to achieve, especially owing to the Israeli resistance to the NPT and to opening up its nuclear facilities for inspection.
These have been administered for over half a century under Israel’s nuclear ambiguity policy, and they are not open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
In 1995, despite an Egyptian attempt to condition agreement on the indefinite extension of the NPT to an Israeli move towards nuclear inspection, US pressure secured the indefinite extension without Israel’s cooperation.
To accommodate the Egypt-led movement to end the Israeli exemption from the treaty, a resolution on the Middle East was adopted during the NPT Review and Extension Conference, but this also fizzled out.
Despite the severing of diplomatic relations between Cairo and Tehran following the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 that ousted the country’s last shah who then found refuge in Egypt, Egypt and Iran continued to work together at the UN to push for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation in the Middle East.
Their joint multilateral work contributed to the continued adoption of the 1974 resolution.
Attempts to relaunch diplomatic relations between the two countries in the late 1990s and again after the 2011 January Revolution in Egypt, diplomatic sources on both sides have said, have contributed to a joint commitment to promote non-proliferation.
Meanwhile, Israel, with the help of successive US administrations, has continued to make an issue of the Iranian nuclear programme and to secretly target Iranian nuclear scientists and others who cooperate with Tehran on its declared peaceful programme.
Last week, less than three months after Israel and the US conducted military strikes on Iranian nuclear installations and announced significant damage to them, Cairo hosted the signing of a treaty between Iran and the IAEA to relaunch the cooperation between the two sides that was suspended by Tehran following the June attacks by Israel and the US.
The deal spares Iran from an October deadline for the activation of the economically and politically hurtful “snap-back mechanism” that was adopted in 2015 as part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal between Iran and the West, from which the US walked out in 2016 after the first election of US President Donald Trump.
While a sign of Egypt’s commitment to the cause of non-proliferation, the Cairo signing of the new Iran-IAEA deal also marks a shift in the volume of engagement between Cairo and Tehran, which have still failed to scale up their diplomatic ties.
“The level of communication between top diplomats from both countries has seen a marked increase this year,” said Tamim Khallaf, official spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry.
Since December 2024, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, has made five visits to Egypt, the last of which was for the signing of the agreement last week. These visits have coincided with the appointment of Badr Abdelatty as Egypt’s foreign minister in July 2024.
Araghchi himself, a former chief nuclear negotiator of Iran, was appointed Iran’s foreign minister in August the same year.
According to Khallaf, it was not difficult for the two ministers to start working on a confidence-building process that would allow Egypt to host the signing of the deal between Araghchi and IAEA Chief Rafael Grossi.
“Egypt’s role in the promotion of this deal, which falls under the umbrella of the strict Egyptian commitment to the cause of non-proliferation, was a significant shift in the bilateral relationship between Cairo and Tehran this year,” Khallaf said.
In June, Iran finally acted on an almost three-decade promise to remove the name of Khaled Al-Islamboli, a key member of the group of assassins that killed former Egyptian president Anwar Al-Sadat in October 1981, from one of its streets.
The political leaders of the early phase of the Islamic Republic denounced Sadat for giving refuge to the ousted shah. They also denounced the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, which was controversial in the Arab and Muslim world upon its signing in March 1979.
Since the groundbreaking visit that former foreign minister Amr Moussa made to Tehran at the head of the Egyptian delegation to an Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit and the subsequent rapprochement between Cairo and Tehran, and presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Mohamed Khatami of Iran, Tehran has made repeated promises to change the name of the street.
It was only this summer that it lived up to its promise. The street now carries the name of key Iranian ally and top figure in the resistance against Israel, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese Shia resistance group Hizbullah, who headed it from 1992 until Israel assassinated him in Beirut in September 2024.
SYMBOLIC STEP: Two informed Egyptian sources said that it was clear that changing the name of the street would not immediately lead to the resumption of full diplomatic relations between Egypt and Iran to the ambassadorial level.
“It is an important symbolic step, but resuming full diplomatic ties requires many other things with regard to Iran’s regional political choices,” said one of the two sources.
He added that the international status of Iran is a key factor in the Egyptian calculations about the resumption of full diplomatic ties.
Like Khallaf, both sources, who asked to remain anonymous, said there was a clear rapprochement in the making between the two countries.
However, they argued that the shift in the Iranian position is part and parcel of a wider shift in Iran’s regional policy following the Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this year.
These also came after Israel managed to eliminate Nasrallah just weeks after the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July last year, hours after he took part in the inauguration of Massoud Pezeshkian as the new president of Iran.
The same sources suggested that there are signs that the Israeli violation of Iranian security includes many other assassinations that were not acknowledged by Israel because of US pressure.
They said that the Iranian leadership has decided that the time has come for Tehran to be more accommodating of regional concerns. This, the sources said, includes Egypt and the leading Arab Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia.
Tehran has offered significant security assurances of non-intervention in the internal affairs of these two countries, the sources said. They added that Iran has also become more accommodating of the concerns of both Cairo and Riyadh over the Iranian role with regard to the Islamist militant groups out of “stability concerns”.
Iran, the sources said, is more accommodating today of the joint Egyptian and Saudi keenness to pursue regional stability and steer clear of any moves that could give Israel a pretext to wreak further havoc in the region.
In a statement on social media posted following the signing of the deal with Grossi in Cairo, Araghchi wrote that “the Iranian people are friends to all nations that prefer the path of peace over the paths of conflict and tension.”
Both sources said that the Iranian willingness to engage has been reciprocated cautiously using a step-for-step approach, especially in Cairo.
On 9 September, following the signing of the Iran-IAEA deal, President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi received both Araghchi and Grossi.
According to Presidential Spokesman Mohamed Menshawi, during the meeting the top Iranian diplomat expressed his country’s gratitude for the role that Egypt had played in securing the signing of the deal. He also spoke of Pezeshkian’s keenness to move forward with bilateral relations.
Menshawi said in a press statement that Al-Sisi had spoken of the need to explore avenues of Egyptian-Iranian cooperation that could serve the interests of both nations.
On 10 September, the Egyptian State Information Service (SIS) said that Al-Sisi had received a call from his Iranian counterpart, who “expressed his deep appreciation for Egypt’s role in facilitating dialogue between Iran and the IAEA.”
The same statement said that Al-Sisi had “stressed Egypt’s commitment to supporting efforts to de-escalate and contain tensions, in light of the escalation in the region that calls for intensified joint action to enhance stability and confront attempts to undermine peace and security.”
It added that Al-Sisi had underlined the “importance of engaging the parties concerned with the Iranian nuclear issue in a serious and constructive dialogue and returning to the negotiating table in order to reach a peaceful settlement that ensures regional security and avoids further escalation.”
Meanwhile, Egypt has said that it will continue to work towards the promotion of non-proliferation in the Middle East. On Saturday, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement that underlined “Egypt’s decades-long call to establish a Middle East free of nuclear weapons”.
The statement warned against the consequences of the absence of binding disarmament measures. It said that this could trigger a regional arms race and would inevitably undermine global security and erode trust in the international non-proliferation regime.
The statement added that Egypt would push at this week’s IAEA General Conference in Vienna, which opened on Monday and will last for four days, for a universal commitment to the NPT.
The Vienna meeting comes a few days before the anticipated adoption by the UNGA of a resolution on nuclear disarmament in the Middle East next week.
Abdelatty, who is expected to lead the Egyptian delegation to the top international diplomatic event, is likely to meet with Araghchi for further consultations.
Sources say that discussions are underway for a possible reunion of Al-Sisi and Pezeshkian in some international setting. Pezeshkian visited Cairo last December at the head of his country’s delegation to the D8 Summit (of the D-8 Organisation for Economic Cooperation) that was hosted by Egypt.
Both Al-Sisi and Pezeshkian were in Doha on Monday for an extraordinary summit of the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in the wake of the Israeli strike against Hamas targets in the Qatari capital. The two leaders held a meeting on the sidelines of the summit.
The strike occurred on 9 September, hours before the signing of the Iran-IAEA agreement.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 18 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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