Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman privately told American evangelical leader Mike Evans that he was ready to recognize Israel “today” and that his father, King Salman, remained the primary obstacle, Evans said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Monday during a visit to Israel.

“When I talked to the crown prince, he told me that he would acknowledge Israel today,” Evans said. “But he said his problem was his father.”

Evans, the founder of Friends of Zion and a longtime evangelical supporter of Israel, said the meeting lasted two hours, with one of the crown prince’s brothers and the Saudi foreign minister also present. The brother expressed a similar view, according to Evans. The Jerusalem Post said it could not independently verify the account.

The comments surfaced as President Donald Trump moved to link a potential agreement ending the war with Iran to a broader push for Arab and Muslim countries to join the Abraham Accords. Trump said Monday that countries including Qatar, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey should normalize relations with Israel as part of an Iran deal, and said he had spoken Saturday with leaders from those countries as well as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

Axios reported Sunday that Trump had asked leaders from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain to normalize ties with Israel after a possible agreement to end the Iran war.

Saudi Arabia has long conditioned recognition of Israel on tangible progress toward a Palestinian state, a position closely associated with King Salman, who hosted the 2018 Arab League summit in Dhahran that placed Palestinian statehood at the center of the Arab consensus. The Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv has assessed that the likelihood of Saudi normalization with Israel will increase after King Salman dies and especially if the crown prince ascends to the throne.

Evans has spoken before about private conversations with Gulf leaders. At a 2019 Jerusalem Post conference in New York, he said Mohammed bin Salman and UAE leader Mohammed bin Zayed were “more pro-Israel than a lot of Jews.” In 2018, Evans was part of a delegation of evangelical Christian leaders that met with the Saudi crown prince in Riyadh in a two-hour session also attended by senior Saudi officials, a rare gesture of religious openness from a kingdom that hosts Islam’s holiest sites and does not formally recognize Israel.

Saudi officials have not publicly commented on Evans’s latest account.

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