Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has committed “genocide” against the Palestinians of Gaza, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday.
Speaking at a warship commissioning ceremony at the Yalova shipyard near Istanbul, the Turkish leader laid into both Israel and the West.
“There is no more trust towards the Western countries that have failed the test on the Gaza issue. Their fascist faces have been exposed. They have not taken a single step to prevent violence. The organizations tasked with global security have suffered a fiasco,” Erdogan said. “They have confined themselves to idly watching acts of genocide and barbarism committed against the people of Palestine by the ‘modern fuehrer’ Netanyahu.”
Türkiye has openly condemned Israel’s military actions in Gaza, accusing West Jerusalem of atrocities against Palestinian civilians in the enclave.
This is the second time in three weeks that Erdogan has compared Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler.
At a speech in Ankara last month, he claimed that what Israel was doing in Gaza was no different than what Nazi Germany had done to Jews during the Second World War.
Netanyahu declared war on Hamas in October, after a series of raids by the Palestinian group claimed the lives of some 1,200 Israelis. Nearly 24,000 Palestinians have been killed since, according to the Gaza health authorities.
The Israeli PM has publicly denounced the idea of any statehood for the Palestinians, while several prominent members of his ruling coalition floated the idea of expelling all the residents of Gaza to Egypt, which even the US denounced as unacceptable.
In his speech on Friday, Erdogan contrasted the behavior of the West with Türkiye’s role in attempting to broker a peace between Russia and Ukraine in March 2022. He said that those talks had been “sabotaged by military lobbies” but now some people were expressing regret about that, just as they will eventually do about Gaza.
“Those who turn a blind eye to the massacres being committed by Israel in Gaza will face disastrous consequences,” the Turkish president said.
Several Turkish lawyers have sought to press charges against Netanyahu at the International Criminal Court (ICC), with Ankara’s tacit approval. Meanwhile, South Africa has sued Israel for genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.