Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz continues his online hate speech campaign against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This time, he targeted Erdoğan over the closure of Instagram in Türkiye.
Turkish Foreign Ministry responded to Katz with a scathing statement. “For some time now, the person in question cannot be taken seriously,” the ministry said on Tuesday, adding that Katz made it a habit to make banal statements full of slander and lies targeting Türkiye and Erdoğan. “Türkiye will continue to support the Palestinians in the strongest possible way,” the statement added.
As Erdoğan escalated his rhetoric against Israel over the latter’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians, Katz also increased the number of his social media posts against Erdoğan, including an open threat where he implied Erdoğan’s fate would be the same as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. He also called for NATO to expel Türkiye from the military alliance.
In Tuesday’s Twitter post, Katz also tagged opposition mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, as well as the youth branch of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) which called for the removal of a ban on Instagram. Neither mayors nor CHP responded to Katz yet. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu has slammed Katz for an earlier similar post the Israeli minister tagged him by siding with President Erdoğan. “People with the blood of tens of thousands of children on their hands cannot teach us democracy and law,” Imamoğlu responded in a post by Katz accusing Erdoğan of dictatorship.
Since Oct. 7, Katz made it a habit to post provocative messages insulting President Erdoğan and Türkiye and recently threatened him by claiming that he followed in the footsteps of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and should remember what happened in Iraq.
Tensions between Israel and Türkiye have risen sharply since the start of the war in Gaza as Ankara has cut off commercial ties with Tel Aviv, with Erdoğan repeatedly trading barbs with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is accused of war crimes and genocide in Gaza.
Besides killing more than 39,000 Palestinians since October, the Israeli military campaign has turned much of the enclave of 2.3 million people into ruins, leaving most civilians homeless and at risk of famine.
Israel is also accused of committing genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave, and a case is continuing at the ICJ in The Hague, in which Türkiye is also a party against Israel.
