Turkish President Recap Tayyip Erdogan accused Israel Wednesday of being ‘a terrorist state’ and of implementing a strategy to wipe out the population of Gaza, during a parliamentary address in which he vowed to bring Israel’s political and military leaders to trial in international courts.
Erdogan says Israel are commiting ‘war crimes’
Asserting that Israel ‘receives the full backing of the US and the West’ in order to ‘commit war crimes,’ Erdogan told the Turkish parliament that ‘the Israeli government has been continuously committing war crimes for the last 40 days, they are bombing hospitals, streets and mosques, and are aiming for all these places intentionally, implementing a strategy of total destruction of a city and its people.’
Israel’s diplomatic ties with Turkey, only recently restored, have deteriorated significantly since October 7, when Hamas terrorists burst through the Gaza border into Israel, killing at least 1,200 people, taking some 240 hostages and triggering a war in which Israel has vowed to eliminate Gaza’s ruling terror group.
He says Hamas is a political party and not a terrorist organization
‘I would like to speak very bluntly. Israel is a terrorist state,’ Erdogan said, to raucous applause.
‘They consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization, but Hamas is a political party that won the collective vote in Palestine, and after they won the election, you have seized and usurped their rights. Israel and the US have seized those rights.’
