Following the ouster of Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan over the weekend, opposition lawmaker Shahbaz Sharif was sworn in as the new prime minister of Pakistan on Tuesday.

Sharif, the head of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) party, has been accused of charges of corruption in the past and was to have been indicted on Monday on money-laundering charges, although he claims the charges were politically motivated.

Sharif has made extremely harsh statements against Israel and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in the past.

During Operation Guardian of the Walls last May, he called Netanyahu “the new Adolf Hitler.” He also compared IDF soldiers to Nazis, saying that “the Palestinians are in the same place as Jewish women, children, and the elderly used to be.”

In 2020, there were reports that Pakistan was holding talks on normalizing relations with Israel, although former prime minister Khan denied it.

However, some sources confirmed that Khan sent a message to Israel to launch normalization talks in order to relieve itself of its “desperate situation” of an increasingly tense relationship with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, leaving Pakistan economically weak and politically isolated.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)