Israel will pay the price for the genocide it has been committing in the Gaza Strip, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Monday, marking the first anniversary of the brutal war Israel has led in response to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
"It should not be forgotten that Israel will sooner or later pay the price for this genocide that it has been carrying out for a year and is continuing," he said on X, formerly Twitter.
“Those dying in Gaza, Palestine, Lebanon are not only women, children, babies, innocent civilians; but also humanity, the international systems that are supposed to serve humanity,” Erdoğan added.
“As long as the Gaza genocide is not paid for, the world cannot have peace,” he argued, noting that Türkiye would continue “taking a stand against the Israeli government and urging the world to join this honorable stance.”
Türkiye has been a vocal critic of Israel since the start of the war and a staunch defender of the Palestinian cause and Hamas, which it rejects classifying as a terrorist group, unlike Western nations.
Erdoğan has repeatedly called Israel a "terrorist state," accusing it of carrying out a genocide in Gaza, branding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the "butcher of Gaza" and comparing him to Nazi Germany's Adolf Hitler.
"Just as Hitler was stopped by an alliance of humanity, Netanyahu and his murder network will be stopped in the same way," Erdoğan said.
"A world in which no account is held for the Gaza genocide will never find peace."
Erdoğan also criticized the international system's failure to stop the conflict in Gaza and now in Lebanon and said: "Israel's long-standing policy of genocide, occupation and invasion must now come to an end."
The Turkish leader often says he is sad to see Muslim countries failing to take a more active stance against Israel, urging them to take economic, diplomatic and political measures to pressure Tel Aviv into accepting a cease-fire.
In addition to delivering humanitarian aid, his government has sought to rally international organizations, including the United Nations, NATO and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), to both restrain Israel and encourage cooperation between Palestinian factions, most notably between Hamas and the Fatah movement.
Israel’s brutal onslaught in the Gaza Strip has hit its first anniversary, which began on Oct. 7 following Hamas’ incursion into southern Israel and has since spread to Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East.
In the past year alone, Israel’s bombing killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, and more than 700 others in the West Bank, which it has occupied since 1967.
The Israeli onslaught has displaced nearly the entire population of Gaza amid a blockade that has caused severe shortages of food, clean water and medicine.
Efforts by the U.S., Egypt and Qatar to mediate a cease-fire and facilitate a prisoner swap between Israel and Hamas have failed, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refusing to halt the offensive.
Israel is also facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its actions in Gaza.
The Lebanon escalation follows a landmark opinion in July by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that declared Israel's decadeslong occupation of Palestinian land unlawful and demanded the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
