Turkey’s intelligence agency served as a “bridge between all parties” in negotiations that led to the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire, according to the agency’s 2025 activity report published Wednesday.
İbrahim Kalın, director of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), wrote in the report’s introduction that the agency carried out “intensive intelligence diplomacy with all relevant actors” on a permanent ceasefire, delivery of humanitarian aid, hostage exchanges, internal Palestinian reconciliation and a two-state solution. “In overcoming problems experienced in ceasefire negotiations, [MİT] undertook a bridge role between all parties, making concrete contributions to achieving positive results,” Kalın wrote.
The ceasefire came after 24 months of Israeli military operations in Gaza that have killed more than 100,000 Palestinians, according to recent demographic estimates, left 78 percent of the territory’s structures destroyed and led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Turkey’s mediation role
Publicly available information suggests Turkey played a significant mediating role but primarily with Hamas rather than in direct trilateral negotiations involving Israel.
US President Donald Trump named Turkey as one of four official ceasefire guarantors, along with the United States, Qatar and Egypt, at the October 2025 Sharm el-Sheikh peace summit. Kalın met repeatedly with Hamas political leaders in İstanbul, Doha and Ankara through September and October 2025 to push the group to accept Trump’s ceasefire proposal. Trump publicly credited Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the breakthrough, calling him “one of the most powerful in the world” and saying, “He’s always there when I need him.”
Hamas officials told Reuters that Turkey’s message in the final negotiations was direct: The time had come to accept the deal. A senior Hamas official said the group agreed under pressure from sustained mediation, a worsening humanitarian situation and a war-weary public.
Israel opposed Turkish participation. Israeli officials have publicly described Turkey as pro-Hamas and an adversary. A Hamas official told Turkish media in December that “Israel has rejected Turkey’s participation, labeling Ankara an enemy.” When asked about a potential Turkish troop deployment to Gaza as part of a post-ceasefire stabilization force, Israeli officials said they would block any Turkish military presence in the territory. Turkey ultimately worked with Israeli negotiators by coordinating through US and Arab mediators.
Two years of destruction
Israel launched its campaign after Hamas-led fighters killed some 1,200 people in Israel on October 7, 2023, most of them civilians, and took 251 hostages into Gaza.
As of February 17, Gaza’s Health Ministry said 72,061 Palestinians had been killed and 171,715 injured. The United Nations and Western intelligence agencies consider the Health Ministry’s figures credible, though the toll likely understates deaths because thousands of bodies remain under rubble and the count does not include indirect deaths linked to starvation, disease and the collapse of the medical system.
A November study by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research estimated violent deaths in Gaza at 100,000 to 126,000, with children under 15 making up 27 percent. A July 2025 household survey published in The Lancet found Gaza’s Health Ministry had undercounted trauma-related deaths by 41 percent. The former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces told an audience in September that “over 10 percent” of Gaza’s 2.2 million people had been killed or injured.
United Nations satellite analysis found that as of July 2025, nearly 78 percent of all structures across Gaza had been destroyed.
On November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, citing reasonable grounds to believe they bore criminal responsibility for alleged war crimes including starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity including murder and persecution. All 125 ICC member states are required to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they enter their territory.
South Africa filed a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in December 2023. Thirteen other countries, including Turkey, have joined the case. In January 2024 the ICJ ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent genocide in Gaza and ensure humanitarian aid delivery, though Israel has not complied with those provisional measures. The case remains ongoing.
In September 2025 the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention, finding that Israeli authorities committed “four of the five acts” defined by the convention as genocide.
Other topics in the report
The activity report, Kalın’s first since he became MİT director in December 2024 after serving as Erdoğan’s chief foreign policy adviser, also addressed Turkey’s peace efforts with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and MİT operations in Syria after the December 2024 fall of Bashar al-Assad.
It said MİT “thwarted espionage attempts” and expanded foreign intelligence reach to “our geography of affinity, primarily Central Asia, the Balkans, the Middle East and African countries,” while developing cooperation with intelligence services in those regions.