Erdogan says Turkey providing evidence for genocide case: ‘Israel will be convicted’
Hitting back at Turkish leader, FM Israel Katz says ‘a country with the Armenian Genocide in its past, now boasts of targeting Israel with unfounded claims’
Turkey is providing documents for a case brought by South Africa against Israel at the UN’s top court on genocide charges over its war against the Gaza-ruling Hamas terror group, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday.
Speaking to reporters in Istanbul, Erdogan said Turkey would continue to provide documents, mostly visuals, on Israel’s strikes in the Gaza Strip.
“I believe Israel will be convicted there. We believe in the justice of the International Court of Justice,” said Erdogan, who has long been among Hamas’s leading supporters globally.
South Africa’s allegation that Israel is committing genocide against Gazans, presented in the International Court of Justice in The Hague this week, is based largely on its assertion that comments by senior Israeli cabinet ministers with a say over war policy demonstrate an intent to kill civilians.
Israel has rejected the accusations as baseless and said South Africa was acting as an emissary of Hamas, which seeks to eliminate the Jewish state. It says the Israel Defense Forces is targeting Hamas, not the general Palestinian population, but that civilian casualties in the fighting are unavoidable as terrorists operate from within the population.
Foreign Minister Israel Katz hit back at Erdogan in a post on X, “The President of Turkey, from a country with the Armenian Genocide in its past, now boasts of targeting Israel with unfounded claims.”
The President of Turkey @RTErdogan, from a country with the Armenian Genocide in its past, now boasts of targeting Israel with unfounded claims. We remember the Armenians, the Kurds. Your history speaks for itself. Israel stands in defense, not destruction, against your barbarian… pic.twitter.com/c9g9YLNKRe
— ישראל כ”ץ Israel Katz (@Israel_katz) January 12, 2024
“Israel stands in defense, not destruction, against your barbarian allies,” he added.
Israel for decades has refused to formally recognize the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915-1917 as genocide, a move based on geopolitical and strategic considerations, primary among them its relations with Turkey. After US President Joe Biden recognized the massacres as genocide in 2021, the Foreign Ministry said it recognized “terrible suffering and tragedy of the Armenian people,” but stopped short of doing likewise.
The ongoing war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught in southern Israel in which some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border, slaughtering some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and seizing around 240 hostages under the cover of thousands of rockets.
In response, Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza, vowing to destroy Hamas and end its rule of the Strip.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza claims that more than 23,000 people have been killed since October 7, an unverified figure that does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 8,000 Hamas operatives inside the coastal enclave — in addition to some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7 — and works to avoid civilian deaths while fighting an enemy that embeds its military infrastructure in homes, hospitals, schools and mosques.
Following the outbreak of war, Israel recalled its diplomats from Turkey after Erdogan accused Israel of committing war crimes. Turkey later also recalled its ambassador from Israel.
