Jordan and the Zionist entity signed on Thursday a deal launching the first phase of a project aiming to build a desalination plant and a pipeline between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea.

Jordan and the Zionist entity signed on Thursday a deal launching the first phase of a project aiming to build a desalination plant and a pipeline between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea.

Gathered on the Jordanian bank of the Dead Sea, a group of Jordanian and Zionist officials signed the deal in attendance of representatives from Washington and the UN's World Bank.

The project aims at providing potable water to Jordan and the Occupied Palestinian territories, including the West Bank through transferring Red Sea water to the Dead Sea, where a desalination plant would eventually be built in Aqaba on Jordan's Red Sea coast.

Thursday's agreement is the extension of a memorandum of understanding signed by Jordan, the Zionist entity and the Palestinian Authority in Washington in late 2013 regarding the project, which aims at replenishing the shrinking Dead Sea and providing potable water for areas around it threatened with drought.

"The project's cost is estimated at $900 million," Jordanian Irrigation Ministry spokesman Omar Salama told The Anadolu Agency.

Salama said that Jordan and the Zionist entity, along with the U.S. and the World Bank, would jointly fund the project.

Jordan's Irrigation Minister Hazem al-Nasser has said in a statement that his government would begin issuing tenders so the project's execution would begin within this year.

Jordan's monarchy normalized relations with the self-proclaimed Hebrew 'state' since the signing of U.S.-sponsored peace accord in 1994.