Turkey and Saudi Arabia signed two memorandums of understanding on Tuesday for a major new railway corridor linking the two countries through Syria and Jordan, with a long-term plan to extend the line to Oman as an overland alternative to the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway currently caught in active hostilities between the United States and Iran.
The agreements were signed in Riyadh as Turkey’s Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu traveled to the Saudi capital. Simultaneously, Turkey’s Trade Minister Ömer Bolat met Syrian Economy and Industry Minister Mohammad Nidal al-Shaar in Gaziantep, near the Turkish-Syrian border, according to regional media outlets.
The deal is being presented by Ankara as a direct economic and political counter to Israel’s regional ambitions. Bolat made no effort to soften that framing.
“The reduction of Israel’s influence in the region, together with increased political and economic solidarity among us, will bring economic prosperity, peace and stability to the Middle East, the Gulf and Türkiye’s southern borders,” he said at the meeting with al-Shaar.
The announcement draws comparisons to the historic Hejaz railway, which ran from Medina to Istanbul in the early 20th century under Ottoman rule, with branches reaching into what is now Lebanon and northern Israel. The new memorandums of understanding are widely seen as a revival of that concept — a rail spine connecting Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, with Oman as a future terminus.
The geopolitical weight of the deal is hard to overstate. For the past three years, Israel and the United States have backed an ambitious competing project: the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor, known as IMEC. That corridor, announced with significant fanfare at the G20 summit in September 2023, was designed to link India with the Gulf states, Israel, and Europe via a combination of sea and land routes — and it places Israel at the center of the transit network.
IMEC has stalled. The primary obstacle is the absence of an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement. The Saudis have consistently demanded irreversible steps toward Palestinian statehood as a precondition. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has rejected that condition outright, and extensive US diplomatic efforts to bridge the gap have not produced a deal.
Former US diplomat Hady Amr said the new Turkey-Saudi rail plan “deliberately bypasses Israel and the UAE,” according to his post on X on Tuesday.
A Facebook page with nearly 900,000 followers dedicated to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman described the deal as a “fatal blow to one of Israel’s most strategically significant economic projects,” referring directly to IMEC. The post claimed that “the Israel-India-UAE axis has been destroyed.”
The timing of the deal adds another layer of complexity. The Strait of Hormuz — one of the world’s most critical oil shipping lanes — is currently the site of active conflict. The US struck Iranian targets near the strait earlier this month after Iran downed an American military helicopter in the area. That blockade, enforced jointly by US and Iranian military presence, has accelerated regional interest in overland trade alternatives. The proposed Turkey-Saudi line is explicitly intended to serve that purpose.
Some Israeli firms have already adapted by finding smaller-scale workarounds. According to the Times of Israel, Israeli companies quietly established overland routes through Saudi Arabia and Jordan earlier in the regional conflict sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, using those paths to bypass the Houthi-imposed blockade on the Bab al-Mandab Strait in the Red Sea. Those informal arrangements, however, operate on a far smaller scale than what the Turkey-Saudi agreement envisions.
The route agreed on Tuesday runs from Turkey through Syria — a country that has only recently emerged from more than a decade of civil war — and then south through Jordan into Saudi Arabia. Syria’s new government, which came to power after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, appears willing to play a transit role. The Gaziantep meeting between Bolat and al-Shaar suggests that Turkey is actively investing in economic ties with Damascus as part of the broader infrastructure push.
For Jordan, the corridor represents a potential economic opportunity — the country sits squarely on the proposed route and has long sought to position itself as a regional logistics hub.
The deal also reshapes Turkey’s strategic profile in the Middle East. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has spent years cultivating closer ties with Gulf states after a turbulent period that included a Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, which Ankara supported. A formal rail agreement with Riyadh signals a deepening partnership that now extends into hard infrastructure.
Background
The Hejaz railway originally ran approximately 1,300 kilometers from Damascus to Medina, completed in 1908 under Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II, primarily to facilitate pilgrimage travel to the holy cities. It fell into disuse after World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The IMEC corridor was announced in September 2023 at the New Delhi G20 summit by the US, India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the EU, among others. It was considered a Western-backed counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Israeli-Saudi normalization talks, which the US brokered intensively before October 2023, have remained frozen since Hamas’s attack on Israel triggered the Gaza war and a broader regional conflict.
What Happens Next
The two memorandums of understanding signed Tuesday establish a framework but do not set a construction timeline. Both governments are expected to move toward formal technical planning agreements. The Syria leg of the route requires further diplomatic and logistical groundwork, given the country’s infrastructure damage from years of civil conflict. Turkey’s separate economic engagement with Damascus, as indicated by the Gaziantep meeting, is likely to continue in parallel. Progress on IMEC, the competing US-backed corridor, is formally contingent on an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal — which no party has indicated is imminent.
