Ever since Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE started the illegal blockade on Qatar on June 5, things have progressed from bad to worse.

The Bahrainis recently upped the rhetoric, with its foreign minister first calling for Qatar’s suspension from the GCC and later their king saying his country would boycott any summit in which Qatar was a participant.

And now, the country has heightened the tensions by going one step further and claiming the right to take back Qatari territory, reported Al Jazeera.

A press release published on the country’s state news agency on Saturday said Bahrain has ‘every right to claim what was cut off forcibly from its land and to dispute the legitimacy of the Qatari rule.’

The statement, which references a historic border dispute that was solved by an international court in 2001, did not specify whether Bahrain intends to take any action.

Last week, the country had imposed visa requirements on Qatari nationals and residents, in a move that Qatar called unprecedented.

The Bahrain-Qatar border dispute began in the mid-1900s, mainly over the Hawar Islands and the town of Zubara.

In 1991, Qatar referred the dispute to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), after decades of failed Saudi mediation and a narrowly avoided armed confrontation between the two countries.

The issue was resolved in 2001 when the ICJ decided that Bahrain had claim over the Hawar Islands while Qatar was awarded Zubara and the Janan Islands.

The Bahraini government, in its statement, said it had ‘endured the intolerable and conceded many of its internationally documented historic rights’ for the benefit of the Gulf countries.

The statement added that Bahrain had ‘agreed to postpone the claim of its rights, accepted the losses and gave up what is rightfully hers in order to ensure the unity of the Gulf.’