Hamas’s Haniyeh said to meet with Turkish FM for first time since October 7
Sources say hostage release, immediate ceasefire, humanitarian aid amain topics of discussion in first official contact between terror group and Ankara in over 3 months
Hamas’s Qatar-based leader, Ismail Haniyeh, has held a meeting with the Turkish foreign minister, diplomatic sources said Sunday, in the first official contact between the two for more than three months.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan met with Haniyeh on Saturday in Turkey, the sources said.
The release of hostages who were captured during Hamas’s October 7 massacres and the establishment of “a ceasefire as quickly as possible” were the main topics of discussion, according to one of the sources.
The sources added that during the meeting, the two sides also discussed “increasing humanitarian aid… and a two-state solution for a permanent peace.”
Fidan and Haniyeh last had official contact in a phone call on October 16.
Earlier in January Haniyeh called for the Islamic world to contribute “financial jihad” to help the terror group “hold on to the victory that took place on October 7 and build upon it.”
“This is not just a humanitarian issue, despite its immense importance and Gaza’s need for any aid it can get. This is financial Jihad. We should revive this principle of Islamic jurisprudence in our Islamic nation—the notion of waging Jihad with one’s life and one’s money,” Haniyeh said in Doha, Qatar on January 9, according to a Middle East Media Research Institute translation of footage aired by Al-Jazeera.
Israel has vowed to eliminate Hamas after its October 7 onslaught, which saw some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border into Israel from the Gaza Strip by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing over 240 hostages, mostly civilians, many amid horrific acts of brutality.
It is believed that 132 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza — not all of them alive.
Istanbul served as a base for Hamas political leaders before the October 7 attacks. Turkey asked the Hamas chiefs to leave after some were captured on video celebrating the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.
But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has since turned into one of the Muslim world’s harshest critics of the death and destruction in Gaza, comparing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler and accusing the United States of sponsoring the “genocide” of Palestinians.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says that over 25,000 people in Gaza have been killed since Israel launched its military campaign to destroy the terror group’s military and governance capabilities. These figures cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires. The IDF says it has killed over 9,000 operatives in Gaza, in addition to some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
