TEHRAN (Iran News) – The United Arab Emirates has made a “huge mistake” in reaching a deal toward normalizing ties with Israel, President Hassan Rouhani said on Saturday in a speech furiously condemning a “betrayal” by the Persian Gulf state.

“They (the UAE) better be mindful. They have committed a huge mistake, a treacherous act. We hope they will realize this and abandon this wrong path,” Rouhani said in his televised speech.

He warned the UAE against allowing Israel a “foothold in the region”.

The UAE-Israel agreement was announced on Thursday, which US President Donald Trump helped to broker.

Rouhani said the deal seemed aimed at ensuring that Trump wins another term in the US presidential election in November and referred to the fact it was announced in Washington.

“Why then did it happen now? If it weren’t a wrong deal, why was it then announced in a third country, in America? So a man in Washington wins votes, you betray your country, your people, Muslims and the Arab world?”

He added that the Emirates may also have thought that they could guarantee security by getting close to Iran’s enemies, but Iran had “historically been the protector of its neighbors and guarantor of the security of the Persian Gulf.”

US President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the UAE and Israel agreed to establish full diplomatic ties as part of a deal to halt the annexation of areas in the occupied West Bank sought by the Palestinians for their future state.

The UAE is the third Arab nation to normalize relations with Israel.

Dangerous consequences

Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) in a statement on Saturday said the deal is an instance of “historic idiocy” and doomed to fail, warning that there would be dangerous consequences for the United Arab Emirates.

The IRGC called the deal a “disgraceful” agreement and an “evil and treacherous act” underwritten by the US that would “accelerate the process of the destruction of the child-killing Zionist regime.”

“The disgraceful agreement… is one of the greatest historic betrayals against the Palestinian cause that inflicted a poisonous dagger on the body of the Muslim world, especially on the resistance and legitimacy of the oppressed Muslim nation of Palestine,” the statement said.

“This treacherous act has multiple goals, including legitimizing the fake Zionist regime, weakening the Palestinian resistance front, consigning the issue of Al-Quds and Palestine to oblivion, paving the way for the implementation of the so-called deal of the century and the new Middle East project and creating conditions for the Arab world to engage with the occupying regime,” the statement added.

The IRGC warned that the deal will bring a “dangerous future” for the Emirati government.

“The United States as well as regional and trans-regional supporters of the infamous Abu Dhabi-Tel Aviv agreement know that this heinous act will not serve the interests of the Zionist regime, and contrary to their expectations, it will spell a dangerous future for them.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the “treacherous” deal does not affect the Palestinian resistance against Israel.

Zarif made the remarks in a telephone conversation with Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Ziad al-Nakhala on Friday, deploring the agreement as worrying.

“We are confident that this treacherous move will not impact the resistance of the Palestinian people and the resistance movement,” Zarif said.

He also stressed that the deal would “certainly increase the hatred of the people of the region and Palestinians for such policies that are against the Palestinian cause.”

Reuters, AP and Press TV contributed to this story.