Sea islands, Tiran and Sanafir, to Saudi Arabia. On 14 July 2022, Israel agreed to the deal. Ancient history - Iotabe Tiran may be the island that Procopius called Iotabe (in ), which was an important toll station for shipping in the area, but other islands in the Gulf of Aqaba have been proposed as alternative identifications. In 473 a Saracen named Amorkesos captured the island and appropriated the revenues, but the Byzantine Empire retook it 25 years later, granting its inhabitants autonomy, subject to payment of taxes on goods exported to India. Around 534, the Byzantines had to retake it again from a group whom Choricius of Gaza called an unholy race, and whom some scholars suppose to have been the Jewish inhabitants who had refused to pay the taxes. The earliest and latest dates mentioned in relation to Iotabe are given in relation to the participation of bishops of the island in the church councils: Macarius in the Council of Chalcedon in 451 (in whose acts the diocese is listed as belonging to the Roman province of Palaestina Tertia), and Anastasius in a synod held at Jerusalem in 536. There is no mention of Iotape in accounts of the Islamic conquests, suggesting that by then the island was uninhabited. Since it is no longer a residential bishopric, Iotape, in its Latin form called Iotapa in Palaestina, is today listed by the Roman Catholic Church as a titular see. The reference by Procopius to an autonomous Jewish community on the island of Iotabe until the 6th century figured in Israeli rhetoric during the Suez crisis and during and immediately after the Six-Day War. Modern history Early Egyptian control "Egypt and Saudi Arabia clarified their sovereignty claims to the islands in 1954, when Egypt informed the UN Security Council that the two islands had been Egyptian territory since the delimitation of the frontier between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in 1906." However, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel the islands had not belonged to Egypt before 1949. During World War II, the Egyptian forces on Tiran and Sinafir islands were part of the contingent of Egyptian troops protecting the Suez Canal, according to Egypt's representative at the 659th UN Security Council meeting on 15 February 1954. In the same meeting, Egypt's representative considered Tiran and Sinafir islands an integral part of the territory of Egypt since they