Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan today launched a fierce attack against Israel and the West that supports it, speaking at a meeting of his AKP party's parliamentary group at noon. "Hamas is not a terrorist organization," Erdogan said, and then stressed that he would not go to Israel as planned, without specifying when the visit was agreed and when he was going to go.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan announced that he was canceling all plans to visit Israel and called Hamas "a group of liberators protecting their land and not a terrorist organization."
Reacting to Israel's attacks on Gaza, the Turkish president said: "The entire West has joined Israel and sees Hamas as a terrorist organization. Israel, the West may owe you a lot, but Turkey owes you nothing. Israel, you cannot go anywhere with this mentality."
In his speech before his party's parliamentary group, Erdogan continued to speak harshly against Israel: "First we looked at the Palestinian issue from the human perspective. We defended human life. Since October 7, we have made every effort to prevent the crisis from escalating. We have sent 8 planes full of humanitarian aid to meet the needs of the people of Gaza. We sent 25 of our staff to Egypt to treat the wounded. We stated that we do not justify actions and attacks targeting civilians. We have no problem with the State of Israel, but we never approved of being treated as an organization instead of a state. Israel is carrying out one of the most violent attacks in history against the oppressed people in Gaza. Half of the dead are children, the other half are their mothers and the elders of the family. That alone is enough to show that there was an atrocity. You cannot find another army setting fire to hospitals, places of worship and markets and continuing this inhuman act."
He continued in the same vein: "Israel is killing children. Israel is killing Israel's children. I said this to the then prime ministers in Davos, I said you know very well how to kill. Since that day I have not been to Davos. I shook Netanyahu's hand once in my life, in the Turkevi in America. He abused our goodwill. We had a plan to go to Israel, but we cancelled it. They abused our goodwill. Oh Israel, you can't go anywhere with that mentality. Take either the US or the West with you. America will also lose. The whole point is to establish a just world. No one can sleep soundly in a world where parents keep the bodies of their children. It also applies to any country where there is no barrier. It is time to talk about the plight of those who have turned their backs on the truth with actions that cannot be compared to these massacres. Justifying attacks is the West's legacy from its bloody history."
Earlier, Turkey's Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said an Israeli ground operation in Gaza would turn the fighting in the Strip "into a massacre", suggesting that those who support Israel's actions out of solidarity "support its crimes" and warned the world that the only possible outcomes from an Israeli-Palestinian confrontation are "permanent peace or world war".
