Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Wednesday that there was “no difference” between Benjamin Netanyahu and Adolf Hitler as he stepped up his attacks on the Israeli leader over the war in Gaza, Agence France-Presse reported.
“There is no difference between the actions of Netanyahu and Hitler,” he said during a ceremony in Ankara.
“He [Netanyahu] is richer than Hitler was. All kinds of support comes from the West and the United States,” Erdoğan added.
Netanyahu responded by saying the Turkish president should be the last person to lecture Israel.
“Erdogan, who commits genocide against the Kurds, who holds a world record for imprisoning journalists who oppose his rule,” Netanyahu said in a statement, “is the last person who can preach morality to us.”
The Turkish leader has lashed out repeatedly at Israel for the scale of death and destruction caused by its response to Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 cross-border attack.
He has branded Israel a “terrorist state” and Netanyahu “the butcher of Gaza” while calling Hamas “a liberation group.”
Hamas gunmen attacked southern Israel on October 7 and killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the deadliest attack in Israel’s history, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
Palestinian militants also took around 250 hostages.
Israel retaliated with a relentless bombardment and a ground invasion in which at least 21,110 people have been killed, according to the latest toll reported by Gaza’s health ministry.
Most of the dead are women and children, it said, with more than 55,000 people wounded.
Erdoğan met with Netanyahu at Turkish House in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on September 20 as ties between the two countries were thawing after more than a decade of tensions.