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President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel a “bloodsucking vampire” because of his approach to the war in Gaza. He declared a day of mourning when the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in an apparent Israeli assassination. And he has praised Hamas, which many Western countries consider a terrorist group, as an “organization of liberation.”
Yet Turkey officially supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, seemingly contradicting Hamas’s goal of wiping Israel off the map.
It is into this complex mix that President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority will step on Wednesday, in a private meeting with Mr. Erdogan in the Turkish capital, Ankara, and in an address to Turkey’s Parliament on Thursday.
Since the start of the Gaza war, Turkey has staked out a unique position that Turkish officials and analysts say is driven by support for the Palestinians, anger at the war’s high civilian toll and domestic politics. Turkey recognizes Israel diplomatically, unlike many other Muslim-majority states, and wants to play a role in ending the Gaza war, while its leaders simultaneously stand up for Hamas, a group dedicated to Israel’s destruction.
Sympathy for the Palestinians is widespread in Turkey’s otherwise polarized society. Many Turks are genuinely horrified by the vast destruction and civilian deaths, so politicians across the spectrum have more to gain from criticizing Israel than from speaking about its security concerns.
Officials in and close to Mr. Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party also have personal relationships with Hamas leaders that go back many years. Mr. Erdogan knew Mr. Haniyeh personally. His foreign minister and former intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, met Mr. Haniyeh often and sometimes passed messages to him from the United States, Jeffry L. Flake, the departing U.S. ambassador to Turkey, told reporters this week.
Last week, during a news conference with his counterpart from Montenegro, Mr. Fidan set aside his normally staid style to lash out at Israel.
“The perpetrators of the massacre in Gaza shouldn’t remain without punishment,” he said. “Those murderers should be held accountable sooner or later at international courts.”
He also criticized countries that send military aid to Israel. He didn’t name them, but the United States is by far the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel.
“It is pretty clear who is escalating the tension,” he said. “Stop the habit of sending the bill to the wrong place. The road to peace and calm in the Middle East comes through reining in the craziness of Israel.”
It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Abbas’s invitation to Ankara was part of a specific Turkish policy proposal. Mr. Abbas heads the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and seeks a two-state solution with Israel. United States officials have suggested that the authority — a fierce rival of Hamas — could help govern Gaza after the war, an idea Mr. Netanyahu has rejected.
Complicating the picture, Mr. Erdogan told members of his party last week that before Mr. Haniyeh’s assassination, Turkey had been planning to invite him to address the Parliament too.
Despite the harsh rhetoric, Turkey has not cut diplomatic ties with Israel, although they have been scaled back and Turkey has announced the suspension of trade.
Turkey has also proposed that it serve as a “guarantor” of a Gaza cease-fire with Hamas in an arrangement under which the United States would secure Israel’s compliance. But that proposal has not gained traction.
Mr. Flake said that despite Mr. Haniyeh’s death, Turkey and the United States still shared the same goal.
“You can imagine that it has been difficult, but we’re both, our two countries, seeking the same thing: a cease-fire that will lead to some kind of enduring peace,” he said.
But the anti-Israel and pro-Hamas statements by Turkey’s leaders have made it hard for Turkey to play a central role in cease-fire negotiations as Qatar and Egypt have, Mr. Flake said.
“In terms of playing a mediating role, the rhetoric makes it very difficult,” he said.
— Ben Hubbard and Safak Timur reporting from Istanbul
Key Developments
Diplomats called for a cease-fire at an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday focused on an Israeli airstrike on Saturday that hit a school compound in northern Gaza where more than 2,000 displaced Palestinians had sought shelter. The Gaza Civil Defense emergency service said more than 90 people were killed in the strike at Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City. Diplomats, who also called for a hostage release, said the war must stop to end human suffering and to prevent a wider war. “Ten months since the start of the war, the threat of further regional escalation is more palpable, and chilling, than ever,” said the U.N.’s top political chief, Rosemary DiCarlo.
Iran sharply criticized three European leaders who had called for restraint in the crisis with Israel, saying Tehran reserved the right to defend its sovereignty. Nasser Kanaani, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said in a statement on Tuesday that the they had ignored Israeli “crimes and terrorism” against Palestinians and in the Middle East. On Monday, the leaders of Britain, France and Germany had urged Iran and its allies not to retaliate for the assassination of a Hamas leader in Tehran because it could disrupt efforts to reach a cease-fire in Gaza.
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Amos Hochstein, one of President Biden’s most trusted national security advisers, met with Lebanese officials in Beirut on Wednesday and called for a cease-fire deal in Gaza that he said would enable a diplomatic resolution between Israel and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah and “prevent an outbreak of a wider war.”
The Biden administration has been working to tamp down regional tensions and avert a war between Israel and Hezbollah. Mr. Hochstein, who has become the de facto U.S. envoy in the quest to end the conflict along the Lebanon-Israel border, is one of a number of administration officials who have fanned out across the Middle East this week in a bid to nail down a cease-fire deal for the war in Gaza and stave off an attack by Iran and its proxies against Israel.
Cease-fire talks are set to take place in Doha, Qatar, or Cairo on Thursday and are expected to include top intelligence officials from Egypt, Israel and the United States, as well as the Qatari prime minister.
Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful regional proxy, has repeatedly said that only an end to Israel’s war in Gaza will lead it to cease its cross-border attacks.
“We continue to believe that a diplomatic resolution is achievable because we continue to believe that no one truly wants a full-scale war between Lebanon and Israel,” Mr. Hochstein told reporters after meeting with Lebanon’s Parliament speaker, Nabih Berri, an influential Hezbollah ally who passes messages back and forth between U.S. officials and the militant group.
Mr. Hochstein warned, however, that there was “no more time to waste and no more valid excuses from any party for any further delay.”
Mr. Hochstein was on his fifth trip to Lebanon since the outbreak of the conflict in Gaza more than 10 months ago, when Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas. Since then, the fighting along the Lebanese-Israeli border has killed over a hundred civilians, displaced more than 160,000 people in both countries and threatened to expand into an all-out war.
The twin killings last month of top Hezbollah and Hamas leaders have intensified fears of a wider regional conflagration, with the region on edge awaiting the expected retaliation against Israel from Iran and Hezbollah.
“We have to take advantage of this window for diplomatic action and diplomatic solutions,” Mr. Hochstein said in Beirut on Wednesday. “That time is now.”
— Euan Ward reporting from Beirut, Lebanon
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Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, led a group of his supporters in prayer on Tuesday at a holy site in Jerusalem that is revered by both Jews and Muslims, violating a historical political arrangement and drawing condemnation in Israel and from around the globe.
Mr. Ben-Gvir was seen in videos online singing songs at the holy site, the Temple Mount, where two ancient Jewish temples were located. The site is known to Muslims as the Aqsa Mosque compound and the place from which the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. The longstanding agreement governing the site is that Jews may visit but not pray there, and much of the international community does not recognize Israel’s claim to East Jerusalem, where the site stands. “Our policy is to allow prayer,” Mr. Ben-Gvir said in a video he posted.
The purpose of the visit was also political. In the video, Mr. Ben-Gvir added that Israel must win the war in Gaza rather than attend meetings in Egypt and Qatar — a reference to the upcoming cease-fire negotiations set to take place on Thursday. “This is the message: We can defeat Hamas and bring it to its knees,” he said.
Mr. Ben-Gvir and a crowd estimated at about 2,000 inflamed tensions with leaders across the world and in Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel assailed Mr. Ben-Gvir on Tuesday, in the latest sign of friction between members of the country’s fragile governing coalition.
“It is the government and the prime minister who determine policy on the Temple Mount,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement, noting that there was no “individual policy” for any minister and that Mr. Ben-Gvir’s decision represented “a deviation from the status quo.”
The actions were taken around the world as a provocation, particularly given that diplomats have been scrambling to calm tensions in the Middle East and hoping that a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas would prevent a further escalation of the conflict following the assassinations last month of a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon and a Hamas leader in Iran. Israel has claimed responsibility for the death in Lebanon and is widely believed to have been behind the one in Iran. Both Iran and Hezbollah have vowed to retaliate.
In a briefing with reporters on Tuesday, Vedant Patel, a deputy spokesman for the State Department, called Mr. Ben-Gvir’s actions “unacceptable” and noted that the move “detracts” from efforts to reach a cease-fire agreement “at a vital time.”
Qatar, which has been among the nations mediating the negotiations between Israel and Hamas, condemned the prayers at the holy site as an attack “on millions of Muslims around the world.” It warned in a statement from its Foreign Ministry on Tuesday that the move could negatively affect the cease-fire talks.
Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry also issued a statement condemning Mr. Ben-Gvir’s decision. It called the move “a provocation to the feelings of Muslims around the world, especially in light of the continuing war and acts of violence against defenseless Palestinians.”
Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s high commissioner for foreign affairs, also issued a statement “strongly” criticizing “the provocations” by Mr. Ben-Gvir. And France’s Foreign Ministry decried Mr. Ben-Gvir’s defiance of a “longstanding ban on Jewish prayer at the Al-Aqsa mosque,” urging Israel to respect the status quo. “This new provocation is unacceptable,” the French ministry said.
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For years, the Israeli government has quietly allowed Jews to pray at the site, but in the videos from the scene on Tuesday, dozens of Jewish visitors are seen fully prostrating themselves in prayer. Some religious officials inside Israel expressed alarm at the flagrant violation.
Moshe Gafni, chair of the religious party United Torah Judaism, said Mr. Ben-Gvir was damaging the Jewish people and defying the dictates of generations of Israel’s chief rabbis. Michael Malchieli, Israel’s religious affairs minister and a member of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, said Mr. Ben-Gvir’s actions were an “unnecessary and irresponsible provocation against the nations of the world.”
Mr. Ben-Gvir, a settler whose government responsibilities include oversight of the police, has not been circumspect about his expansionist aims or his opposition to a Palestinian state. He strongly opposes a cease-fire with Hamas, and his decision to lead a group to the sensitive site for prayers just as negotiations were set to resume underscored disagreements within Israel over the wisdom of striking a deal and halting the war in Gaza.
There are about 115 hostages — dead and living — believed to still be held in Gaza. Relatives of the hostages on Tuesday accused Mr. Ben-Gvir of repeatedly trying to thwart a cease-fire deal, saying the minister was endangering the chances of bringing their captive family members home.
