ADDS MORE REMARKS BY TURKISH PRESIDENT
By Esra Tekin
ISTANBUL (AA) – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday urged the leaders of the world’s majority-Muslim nations to meet at the leadership level “without further delay” to help defend Palestinians against Israel’s attacks, nearly a year into a relentless Israeli offensive that has taken some 41,000 lives.
“The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which is tasked with defending the cause of Jerusalem, cannot remain indifferent to these increasingly audacious attacks,” Erdogan said after a Cabinet meeting in the Turkish capital Ankara.
“It’s urgent for the organization to convene at the leadership level without further delay and to demonstrate the decisive stance of the Islamic world,” he added.
Stating that Türkiye supports Egypt’s mediation efforts to reach a cease-fire in Gaza and to ensure the unrestricted entry of aid, at a time when Israel has stepped its expansionist policies, Erdogan said all regional countries need to strengthen their solidarity front.
On Israel’s killing last week of Ayşenur Eygi, a dual citizen of Türkiye and the US, during a protest against illegal Israeli settlements near Nablus in the occupied West Bank, Erdogan said Ankara will take “every legal step” to ensure her blood “was not spilled in in vain,” including by appealing to the International Court at The Hague, which has already been investigating charges that Israel has been committing genocide.
“The genocidal Israeli government, which has massacred 41,000 people, including women, children, elderly and civilians, will definitely be held accountable for its crimes,” he added.
With Israel’s attacks on Gaza nearly a year old now, Erdogan said Türkiye has accelerated its efforts for the Islamic world to take a more decisive stance against the “genocide in Gaza.”
“The Israeli government seeks to expand its policy of occupation and invasion to include our first Qibla, (Jerusalem’s) Al-Aqsa Mosque,” he added, referring, among others, to an Israeli government minister proposing building a synagogue there, in violation of the status quo in the sacred city.
He reiterated that Turkish nation which “wrote an epic of resistance against the imperialist powers of the time during its War of Independence” continues to stand by its “Palestinian brothers and sisters.”