The Telegraph has reported that Turkey is allowing senior Hamas operatives to plot attacks against Israel from Istanbul.
Their exclusive report revealed transcripts of Israeli police interrogations with suspects that show senior Hamas officials are using Turkey’s largest city to oversee operations in Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories. Crucially, an assassination attempt on the Mayor of Jerusalem is believed to have been orchestrated there.
Last weekend, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, despite Israel’s repetitive attempts to highlight to the Turkish governments Hamas’ use of Turkish territory. Haniyeh also reportedly met with Saleh Arouri, a founding commander of the Hamas military wing who lives in Istanbul and who has a $5 million bounty on his head from U.S. State Department.
According to Israeli and Egyptian intelligence records, a dozen Hamas operatives have moved to Istanbul from the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip in the last year alone. Among that number are seven men freed from Israel prisons as part of the 2011 exchange deal that saw IDF soldier Gilad Shalit returned from captivity in Gaza in return for the release of more than 1,000 security prisoners.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry rejected the reports on its twitter account stating: “Various countries, including Turkey, have contacts with Hamas at different levels”. Turkey denies that Hamas is a terrorist group.
In a 2015 US-brokered deal between Israel and Turkey, Turkey agreed to stop Hamas planning attacks from its soil, but Israeli officials have criticised Turkey for consistently failing to uphold this agreement.
Click here to read the Telegraph’s investigation.
Jerusalem and Ankara were once close regional allies, however ties were cut following the Mavi Marmara raid that saw a deadly confrontation between Israeli commandos and Turkish activists seeking to breach Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, in May 2010. In June 2016, a reconciliation deal saw the restoration of full ambassador-level relations after they were dramatically downgraded. Israel’s then-Deputy Ambassador to the UK, Eitan Na’eh, was appointed as the Ambassador to Turkey by the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
