Turkey’s deputy education minister, Nazif Yilmaz, threatened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on social media: ‘One day they will shoot you’ and ‘You will die’.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Wednesday that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza was disproportionate and a ‘massacre’ of the Palestinians, ‘devoid of any ethical foundation’.
In response to the United States’s dispatch of an aircraft carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean, he said, ‘What will the aircraft carrier of the U.S. do near Israel; why do they come? What will boats around and aircraft on it will do [sic]? They will hit Gaza and around, and take steps for serious massacres’. Erdoğan also said on Wednesday, ‘Israel should not forget that if it acts more like an organization, rather than a state, it’ll finish by being treated as such.’ He called Israeli strikes on Gaza ‘shameful’.
Erdoğan has indicated that he is interested in serving as a mediator between Israel and Hamas.
Erdoğan enjoys close relations with the Hamas leadership. A couple of months ago, Erdoğan hosted Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who spends his time between Qatar and Turkey.
In 2018, Erdoğan said that Israel ‘is the world’s most Zionist, fascist and racist state’.
He continued: ‘There is no difference between Hitler’s obsession with the Aryan race and Israel’s understanding that these ancient lands are meant only for Jews. The spirit of Hitler … has found its resurgence among some of Israel’s leaders’.
Turkey is an American ally and a member of NATO.
Before Erdoğan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party came into power in 2002, Turkey was a secular state with strong strategic ties to Washington and Jerusalem.