JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel has agreed to cooperate with the United Nations Human Rights Council, a year and a half after severing contact with the international body.

Sunday’s announcement following the decision by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu means that Israel will participate Tuesday in a periodic review of the country’s human rights record, as do all of the UNHRC’s 193 member states.

Israel has been under pressure in recent weeks to return to the Human Rights Council, exerted most notably by the United States and Germany. Other countries, including Canada, Australia Spain and France, also encouraged Israel to appear for the review, which will take place in Geneva.

Israel boycotted the review in January and was granted several extensions since then. If it had not agreed to appear for the rescheduled review on Tuesday, Israel would have been the first country to boycott the review. Iran and Syria took part in the first round of the quadrennial reviews.

Israel has boycotted the UNHRC in March 2012, after it appointed a fact-finding mission on how Israel’s West Bank settlements affect Palestinians

In exchange for Israel’s agreement to participate, Western countries have agreed not to participate in debate during agenda item 7, a standing UNHRC agenda item which requires debate on Israeli human rights violations of the Palestinian, and to work to add Israel to the membership of the group of states in the council known as WEOG , or Western Europe and others group.

“Now is the time for the council to show good faith on its part — starting with the removal of its notorious agenda item on Israel, the only provision of its kind focusing on a specific country at every meeting,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based human rights group that monitors the U.N. “Not even gross abusers like China, Sudan, or Syria, nor any other country in the world, is subjected to this kind of treatment.”

Neuer also called on European Union states to “immediately enable Israel to join the council’s Western group, to which it was admitted at the U.N. in New York over a decade ago.”