In Israel, Cypriot president blasts Turkey for ‘sabotaging regional understanding’

Ahead of the eighth trilateral Israel-Greece-Cyprus summit, Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades lays out the areas under discussion in the summit: COVID-19 and its long-term effects, climate change and its regional implications, creating an emergency management forum, energy cooperation in the EastMed Gas Forum (EMGF), the latest developments in the Abraham Accords, and EU-Israel relations.

Anastasiades lays into Turkey in his address, calling it a country that is “actively sabotaging any effort for regional understanding.” He accuses Turkey of “practicing a revisionist policy in which might is right,” and of violating Cyprus’s exclusive economic zone in the Mediterranean.

Anastasiades says he will brief his counterparts on ongoing tensions with Turkey in Cyprus.

Turkey’s offshore energy exploration efforts have raised tensions with Greece and Cyprus. Warships from Greece and Turkey shadowed each other in the Aegean Sea after Turkish search vessels and drill ships prospected for hydrocarbons in waters where Greece and Cyprus claim exclusive economic rights. Ankara rejects those claims, saying they infringe on the rights of Turkey and of Turkish Cypriots on the divided island of Cyprus.

While rejecting a two-state solution in Cyprus, Anastasiades calls for negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians that result in a “just and viable two-state solution which will address the legitimate security concerns of the State of Israel, and will enable Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in security and peaceful co-existence with all their neighbors.”