Saudi Arabia is discussing a defense deal with the United States that it hopes to seal when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visits the White House next month, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

A senior official in US President Donald Trump’s administration told the British outlet that there were “discussions about signing something when the crown prince comes, but the details are in flux.”

The FT said the deal under discussion was similar to the recent US-Qatar pact that pledged to treat any armed attack on Qatar as a threat to the United States. The US deal with Qatar came after Israel last month attempted to kill leaders of Hamas with an airstrike on Doha.

Several lower-level members of the Palestinian terrorist group and a Qatari guard were killed in the attack, which failed to kill the key Hamas leaders it was targeting.

The US State Department told the FT that defense cooperation with the kingdom was a “strong bedrock of our regional strategy,” but declined to comment on details of the potential deal.

The US State Department, the White House and the Saudi government did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the FT report.

Saudi Arabia has long sought guarantees similar to the Qatar deal as part of Washington’s efforts to normalize relations between Riyadh and Israel. These efforts were stalled by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that started the war in Gaza, and Prince Mohammed has since said any normalization with Israel would be conditional on a Palestinian state, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heavily opposes.

In May, Trump dropped demands that Saudi Arabia normalize ties with Israel as part of nuclear cooperation talks. The condition was a major sticking point for former US president Joe Biden, who had been overseeing the talks during his term.

Last month, Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan that said an attack on either country would be considered an attack on both.

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