Erdogan warns Israel of ‘heavy price’ if it targets Hamas members in Turkey
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned Israel of a “heavy price” if the Tel Aviv regime carries out its alleged plot to target members of the Palestinian Hamas resistance group on Turkish soil.
The Turkish leader made the warning as he was speaking with journalists on his return flight from a two-day Qatar trip on Tuesday, just a day after the Shin Bet chief revealed that Tel Aviv intends to assassinate Hamas members living outside Palestine.
“If they dare to take such a step against Turkey, they will pay a price which they cannot recover from,” Erdogan said, stressing, “Those who attempt such a thing should not forget that the consequences can be extremely serious. No one is unaware of Turkey’s progress in both intelligence and security fields worldwide. Additionally, we are not a newly established state.”
His warning came just two days after Israel's Kan news network aired a recording in which Ronen Bar, the head of Israel's internal spy agency – known as Shin Bet - said Tel Aviv was determined to kill Hamas leaders “in every location” around the world.
“In Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Qatar, everyone,” Bar added in the recordings. “It will take a few years, but we will be there in order to do it,” he added.
Shin Bet's head went on to say, “The cabinet set a goal for us, to take out Hamas. And we are determined to do it, this is our Munich.”
Bar was referring to the years-long Israeli effort to assassinate Palestinians purportedly responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics attack, in which 11 Israeli athletes were killed.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime's decades-long suppression and devastation against Palestinians.
More than 16,000 Palestinians have been killed in the US-backed war, most of them women and children.
Erdogan has been vocal in denouncing Israel’s relentless strikes on Gaza and has already said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will eventually be “tried as a war criminal.”
Ankara and Tel Aviv had restored their diplomatic ties only recently, but the current war has deteriorated their bilateral relations significantly.
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