Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas is set to soon make an official visit to Turkey, during which he will meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the official state-run news agency of the Palestinian National Authority Wafa reported, citing Palestinian Ambassador to Turkey Faed Mustafa.
Mustafa said discussions are going on to finalize the timing of the visit through diplomatic channels and in line with the proper protocols.
He also confirmed President Abbas has received an invitation from the speaker of the Turkish parliament to speak before the legislature. Efforts are currently underway to schedule this address through official diplomatic communications between the two countries, he said.
The lack of response to this invitation from Abbas has been slammed by Erdoğan, who said on Saturday that Abbas should offer an apology for not responding to Ankara’s invitation.
“President Mahmoud Abbas, who did not come despite our invitation, must apologize first. We invited him, but he has not come. We are waiting to see if he will,” Erdoğan said.
Turkey extended the invitation to Abbas to speak at its parliament after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech to the US Congress last week where he defended his country’s ongoing war on Gaza and received prolonged applause and standing ovations from members of Congress.
Erdoğan sharply criticized the United States for hosting Netanyahu, whom he called “the Hitler of our age” and accused the US of hypocrisy regarding human rights.
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which began on October 7 following an unprecedented attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, has led to more than 39,000 casualties and massive devastation, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
Erdoğan has become one of the harshest critics of Israel’s war in Gaza.
He has branded Israel a “terrorist state” and compared Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler while calling Hamas “a liberation group.”
Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel, is a rival of Abbas’s Fatah faction, which rules the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank.
It ousted Fatah from Gaza in 2007 following its landslide victory in the last Palestinian parliamentary elections the previous year.