Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu discussed the upcoming visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Turkey in a phone call with Yair Lapid on Sunday.
According to the Foreign Ministry, Çavuşoğlu thanked Lapid for extending his get well soon wishes to him over COVID-19.
The foreign minister had tested positive for COVID-19 and said he would continue to work from home.
The phone call between the two top diplomats came after a high-level Turkish delegation led by Presidential Spokesperson Ibrahim Kalın visited Israel on Thursday and met with Israeli officials ahead of Herzog's visit.
In steps toward a thaw in relations with Israel, Turkish officials have stressed that Turkey's support for the Palestinian cause and a two-state solution remains as strong as ever.
Relations between Turkey and Israel hit a low in 2010 following an Israeli naval raid on a Turkish aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, en route to deliver humanitarian aid to the blockaded Gaza Strip. The raid killed 10 activists. The event caused an unprecedented crisis in Turkish-Israeli relations that had been peaceful for decades. Both countries even recalled their diplomatic envoys following the incident.
In 2013, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apology to Turkey and the payment of $20 million (TL 272 million) in compensation to the Mavi Marmara victims, Turkish-Israeli relations entered a period of normalization.
In December 2016, both countries reappointed ambassadors as part of the reconciliation deal and reiterated several times the necessity to further improve bilateral relations. The two countries once again expelled each other's ambassadors in 2018 after another bitter falling out, and relations have since remained tense.
In recent months, however, the two countries have been working on a rapprochement with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause, holding telephone talks with his Israeli counterpart and other Israeli leaders.
