Remote confrontation between Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Benjamin Netanyahu. The Turkish president, in the context of the war in Gaza, speaking in Ankara compared the Israeli prime minister to Adolf Hitler. “We saw Israel’s Nazi camps in the stadiums, right?” Erdogan said, referring to a video broadcast on Turkish television that showed Israeli soldiers in a Gaza stadium with half-naked men. “What is this? Remember how they talked about Hitler in a strange way? How are you different from Hitler?” he asked. Netanyahu’s response came quickly: «Erdogan, who is carrying out a genocide of the Kurds and who keeps in prison a record number of journalists around the world who oppose his government, is the last one who can preach morality to us. ».
The controversy between Israel and Turkey comes as Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza extends to Palestinian refugee camps in the center of the Strip and as fears grow of an extension of the conflict regionally, especially after the alleged Israeli Christmas attack in which a senior adviser to the Iranian Pasdaran, General Seyed Razi Mousavi, was killed in Syria. “Iran reserves the legitimate and inherent right, under international law and the Charter of the United Nations, to respond decisively” to Israel, said Iranian Ambassador to the UN, Saeed Iravani, in a letter to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. And a Revolutionary Guards spokesman said Tehran’s response “will be a combination of direct actions and the resistance front.” In light of the extent of the attacks in the center of the Strip, thousands of Palestinians fled to Deir al-Balah and Rafah, but according to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 20 people were killed in an airstrike that hit a residential building near the Al-Balah hospital. Amal; and a drone attack also hit the Nur Shams refugee camp in the West Bank, causing 6 deaths.
There was then a rare public difference of opinion between Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard over the October 7 massacre. A Pasdaran spokesman declared that the “Al-Aqsa Flood”, that is, the Hamas attack on southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza, was one of the responses “undertaken by the axis of resistance against the Zionists for martyrdom of Major General Soleimani”, a reference to the assassination of the commander of the Quds Force of the same Revolutionary Guard, General Qassem Soleimani, which occurred in a US attack on Iraq on January 3, 2020. A version rejected shortly afterwards by Hamas, which in a statement said that “All acts of Palestinian resistance arise in response to the Zionist occupation and its continued aggression against our people and our holy sites.” In this context, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as reported by Axios, will return to the Middle East next week.
The news comes after Blinken met with Netanyahu’s envoy, Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, in Washington on Tuesday, who also met with White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Blinken is expected to arrive in Israel on Friday next week and then also make stops in the West Bank, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. It will be Blinken’s fourth trip to the Middle East and his fifth visit to Israel since the start of the war.
Source: IL Tempo
John Cameron is a journalist at The Nation View specializing in world news and current events, particularly in international politics and diplomacy. With expertise in international relations, he covers a range of topics including conflicts, politics and economic trends.
