Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sympathizes with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Deutsche Welle Turkish service reported on Monday.
Speaking during his trip to Tunisia at a joint press conference with his Tunisian counterpart, Çavuşoğlu also claimed the PKK and Netanyahu have a point in common as they are both “baby-killers.”
“Netanyahu has been quite anxious lately. It is because he has understood that he will not be able to divide Syria. He has been particularly sympathetic to the PKK as he intended to divide Syria by using them,” said Çavuşoğlu.
Çavuşoğlu’s remarks were an apparent reaction to Netanyahu’s recent tweets slamming Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“I was just exposed to the daily trolling of the anti-Semitic dictator Erdogan. He is obsessed with Israel. He knows what a moral army is and he knows what a genuine democracy is, as opposed to an army that massacres women and children in Kurdish villages and a state which, to my regret, is becoming more dictatorial day by day,” Netanyahu had tweeted on Sunday.
Erdoğan responded to the tweets on Sunday by claiming “Netanyahu, you have knocked at the wrong door. Erdoğan is the voice of the oppressed, you are the voice of the oppressors. You conduct state terror wherein your soldiers and policemen jackboot women and children. Your words fit you, not Erdoğan.”
Ties between the two countries were strained in May when Turkey recalled its ambassador and expelled Israel’s envoy following violence along the Gaza border, where 61 Palestinians were killed.
Israel and Turkey had exchanged ambassadors back in 2016, after a five-year period following the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident during which the countries did not have full diplomatic ties.
The Mavi Marmara incident concerns the killing by Israeli commandoes in international waters of nine Turkish and one Turkish-American pro-Palestinian activists who were part of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla on its way to Gaza to deliver aid.