Azerbaijan has reportedly decided to open an embassy in Israel, one of its closest strategic partners. The news comes amid increasingly strained ties between Azerbaijan and Iran, Israel’s longtime nemesis, Eurasianet reported.

A decision has already been made to open the embassy, said Arzu Naghiyev, a member of Azerbaijan’s parliament and a member of the Azerbaijan-Israel parliamentary working group.

“The opening of the Azerbaijani embassy in Israel can be delayed only for technical reasons,” he told local news site Pravda.az.

Despite the deep, multi-faceted ties between the two countries, particularly in security and trade, Azerbaijan has never opened an embassy in Israel. But the latter has had an embassy in Baku since 1992.

“One, the Abraham accords [establishing relations between Israel and some Arab countries] and the recent normalization of ties between Israel and Turkey, make it harder to claim that a Muslim-majority state having relations with Israel is something out of the ordinary,” said Gallia Lindenstrauss, a senior research fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies.

“Second, the clear military victory of Azerbaijan in the second Nagorno-Karabakh War makes it also less dependent on political support from the Arab and Muslim world,” she told Eurasianet.