Türkiye on Sunday blasted Israeli claims that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was “arming and funding” Palestinian resistance group Hamas and accused it of trying to direct attention away from the massacres in the Gaza Strip.
The angry rebuttal came after Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz accused Erdoğan of “supplying arms and money to Hamas to kill Israelis.”
In a post on X in Turkish, Katz claimed that the Israeli security services had dismantled “terrorist cells” that were “under directions from Hamas headquarters in Türkiye.”
In response, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said Israel’s top diplomat was “trying to conceal the crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians behind a series of lies, slander and disrespect.”
“But Israel’s dirty propaganda and psychological pressure aimed at Türkiye and President Erdoğan will not bear fruit,” the ministry said.
Israel’s relentless genocidal war on Gaza has killed at least 38,983 people, most of them women and children, and injured over 89,700, according to local health authorities.
Flouting a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire, Israel has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza since an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
Ankara has been a fervent critic of Israel’s conduct of the war, with Erdoğan repeatedly trading barbs with Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu.
Dubbing him the “butcher of Gaza,” Erdoğan has accused Netanyahu of seeking to “spread the war” across the wider Middle East, a point repeated in the Foreign Ministry’s statement.
It accused “the members of Netanyahu’s government” of “wanting to provoke a regional war to stay in power,” calling for them to be tried in international courts.
“Türkiye will continue to defend the right of the Palestinian people to live in justice and peace,” the Foreign Ministry added.
Ankara considers Hamas a liberation movement, unlike the majority of the Western world, and has hosted its political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Türkiye several times to discuss cease-fire efforts and the humanitarian aid crisis in the blockaded enclave.
