Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi will pay an official one-day visit to Turkey on Wednesday for talks focused on the regional repercussions of the Israel-Hamas war, a diplomatic source told Agence France-Presse.
Raisi will meet with Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara, making a visit that was postponed twice — once in November and once earlier this month — because of spiraling tensions across the Middle East.
Iran’s official news agency IRNA said Raisi would lead a “high-ranking political and economic delegation.”
The visit comes amid growing fears about the regional repercussions of the war in Gaza, which Israel launched in retaliation for the unprecedented October 7 attacks by Hamas that resulted in the death of about 1,140 people in Israel, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
In response Israel has carried out a relentless offensive that has killed at least 25,490 people in Gaza, around 70 percent of them women, children and adolescents, according to local authorities.
Raisi vowed on Monday that Israel “will certainly pay” for the killing in Syria of a senior general with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The United States and Britain launched a second round of joint military strikes on Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen on Tuesday due to their repeated attacks on Red Sea shipping.
Erdoğan condemned the first round of strikes early this month as “disproportionate,” accusing Washington and London of trying to turn the Red Sea into a “bloodbath.”