The jebel was a site of contention in the early-to-mid 20th century between Ibn Saud and Amir Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani. Ibn Saud had wanted Jebel Nakhsh to be Saudi Arabia's frontier with Qatar. According to him, the Qatari Amir had previously signed an agreement ceding Jebel Nakhsh to him, although the Amir denied this. In a 1935 correspondence between British diplomats concerning the Saudi-Qatar frontier, the British claimed that they [the Qataris] could never consent to attribute to Saudi Arabia features, such, for example, as the Jebel Naksh, which form an integral part of the physical structure of the Qatar Peninsula itself and have always, in fact, been an equally integral part of the Sheikhdom. In the following weeks, a British communique stated that they could not agree to deprive the Sheikh of any portion of the main block of that peninsula.