ADDS MORE STATEMENTS BY TURKISH PRESIDENT
By Gozde Bayar and Zehra Nur Duz
By killing over 14,000 innocent children in Gaza, Israel has already outdone Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the Turkish president said on Wednesday.
With unconditional support from the West, Israel is carrying out massacres that are marks of shame in human history, both in Gaza and the West Bank, Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a Justice and Development (AK) Party group meeting in the Turkish parliament.
Saying that no one can question Türkiye’s sensitivity to the Palestinian issue, Erdogan added that the Palestinian cause gave his life new meaning.
“As long as God grants me life, I will continue to defend the struggle of Palestine, and will be the voice of the oppressed Palestinian people,” Erdogan added.
Comparing the struggle of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas to the Turkish War of Independence over 100 years ago, Erdogan said: “We are well aware that there is a price to pay for saying this.”
Erdogan told how 15 years ago, at the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he challenged the Israeli leadership and its oppression of Palestinians, in an encounter that went viral, by objecting, “One minute!”
"When no one else would speak, we stood up and said: 'Hamas is not a terrorist organization, but a resistance group.' We presented maps at the UN showing how Israel has gradually occupied the lands of Palestine over the past 70 years," he added.
"We stood by our Palestinian brothers and sisters in every way, especially during the most difficult times. We have mobilized all our resources for Palestine, for the oppressed people of Gaza," Erdogan stressed.
Erdogan reiterated Türkiye’s determination to courageously defend Palestine’s struggle for independence under any and all circumstances.
Since an Oct. 7 cross-border attack by Hamas which killed some 1,200 people, Israel has waged a relentless offensive on Gaza, taking the lives of nearly 34,000 people, most of them women and children, and injuring almost 77,000 others.
Israel’s war on Gaza has pushed 85% of the territory's population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while over 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.