“Israel wholeheartedly rejects the Turkish president’s harsh words about the terrorist organization Hamas,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Lior Hayat said after Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Hamas is not a terrorist group.

“Hamas is a despicable terrorist organization worse than ISIS that brutally and deliberately murders babies, children, women and the elderly, holds civilians hostage and uses its own people as human shields,” Hayat emphasized in a post on Twitter.

Israel wholeheartedly rejects the Turkish President’s harsh words about the terrorist organization Hamas.
Hamas is a despicable terrorist organization worse than ISIS that brutally and intentionally murders babies, children, women and the elderly, takes civilians hostage and uses… pic.twitter.com/LU4mJGz18v

— Lior Haiat 🇮🇱 (@LiorHaiat) October 25, 2023

“The Turkish president’s attempt to defend the terrorist organization and his politically motivated words will not change the horror that the whole world has seen nor the indisputable fact. In other words, Hamas = ISIS,” he adds.

Erdogan’s statements

Turkey’s president announced that he is canceling all his plans to visit Israel and called Hamas “a group of liberators who protect their land and not a terrorist organization.”

Reacting to Israel’s attacks on Gaza, the Turkish president said: “The entire West has joined Israel and sees Hamas as a terrorist organization. Israel, the West may owe you a lot, but Turkey owes you nothing. Israel, you can’t go anywhere with this mentality.”

At the same time, he did not fail to mention that Turkey is ready to be a guarantor country for Palestine “both with political and military presence. In a world full of the living dead, we, as a country and a nation, will continue to speak the truth and continue to use all political, diplomatic and, if necessary, military means. However, we will not resort to non-strategic moves that will not benefit our country and the Palestinian people.”

In his speech before his party’s caucus, Erdogan continued to speak harshly against Israel: “First we looked at the Palestinian issue from a human perspective. We defended human life. Since October 7, we have been making every effort to prevent the crisis from escalating. We sent 8 planes full of humanitarian aid to meet the needs of the people of Gaza. We sent 25 of our staff to Egypt to treat the wounded. We stated that we do not justify actions and attacks targeting civilians. We have no problem with the state of Israel, but we have never approved of being treated like an organization instead of a state. Israel is carrying out one of the most violent attacks in history against the oppressed people of Gaza. Half of the dead are children, the other half are their mothers and family elders. This alone is enough to show that there was an atrocity. You cannot find another army that sets fire to hospitals, places of worship and markets and continues this inhuman act.”

And he continued in the same vein: “Israel is killing children. We can never allow that. I said this to the then Prime Ministers in Davos, I said you know very well how to kill. I haven’t been to Davos since that day. I shook Netanyahu’s hand once in my life, in Turkevi in America. He abused our goodwill. We had a plan to go to Israel, but we canceled it. They abused our goodwill. Oh Israel, you can’t go anywhere with this mindset. Take either the US or the West with you. America will also lose. The whole point is to establish a just world. No one can sleep peacefully in a world where parents hold their children’s bodies. It also applies to any country where there is no barrier. It is time to speak about the plight of those who turned their backs on the truth with acts that cannot be compared to these massacres. Justifying attacks is the West’s legacy from its bloody history.”

Earlier, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said from Doha that an Israeli ground operation in Gaza would turn fighting in the Strip “into a massacre”, adding that those who support Israel’s actions out of solidarity “support its crimes” and warned the world that the only possible outcomes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are “permanent peace or world war.”