By backing the ongoing indirect negotiations in Egypt between Israel and Hamas, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey is drawing on its long-standing ties with the Palestinian Islamist movement.
Erdogan said Wednesday that he had been “explicitly” asked by Donald Trump to convince Hamas to engage in peace talks with Israel.
The Islamist-conservative president, who has led Turkey for 22 years, is taking on this role eagerly, as the overwhelmingly Sunni country of 86 million people is united in condemning what it calls an ongoing “genocide” in Gaza.
A Turkish delegation led by intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin is currently in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to take part in the negotiations. Kalin also attended talks in Doha last week and held a series of meetings with U.S., Egyptian, Qatari, and Hamas officials, according to security sources cited by the state-run Anadolu agency.
Turkey maintains close relations with the Palestinian movement and hosts its representatives on Turkish soil, analysts interviewed by AFP noted.
“Resistance”
“Erdogan has always viewed Hamas as a resistance movement, comparable to Turkey’s own struggle against European powers after World War I,” said Özgür Unluhisarcikli, head of the German Marshall Fund in Ankara.
“There is only one position that matters in Turkey: Israel is committing genocide, and it must be stopped,” Unluhisarcikli added.
According to media reports, Erdogan discreetly asked Hamas leaders—including former political chief Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in an Israeli strike in Tehran in July 2024, to leave Turkey on October 7, 2023, amid Ankara’s rapprochement with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
The massacre that day of 1,219 people—mostly civilians—in southern Israel, and the abduction of 251 hostages, triggered an Israeli offensive on Gaza that has since killed at least 67,100 people, according to Gaza health ministry figures.
“For Turkey, the key criterion is not Hamas’s nature but its resistance to Israeli occupation and the legitimacy it enjoys among Palestinians,” explained Mustafa Yetim, professor of international relations at Eskisehir Osmangazi University.
“Aligned Positions”
Many senior Hamas figures, including Ismail Haniyeh, have found a welcoming base in Turkey since the early 2000s, notes Talha Ismail Duman, a Middle East researcher at Sakarya University.
“Some Hamas members live there, and delegations from the movement frequently meet with Turkish political and security officials,” he said.
AFP has met in Istanbul over the past 18 months with Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau and former Gaza health minister, as well as senior official Osama Hamdan.
According to Duman, ties were “especially strong with Khaled Meshaal (head of Hamas’s political bureau until 2017), whose positions aligned with the Arab Spring and the war in Syria,” while another faction of the movement drew closer to Iran and Hezbollah.
But “the rise of Ismail Haniyeh in 2017 and Yahya Sinwar (killed by the Israeli army in Gaza in October 2024) gradually reduced Turkish influence,” he added.
“Today, Hamas balances its relations between Iran and Turkey,” allowing Ankara to leverage its role with the White House, Duman observed.
On July 29, Turkey joined a UN resolution sponsored by France and Saudi Arabia, linking Hamas’s disarmament to the creation of a Palestinian state.
“And we said nothing different during our discussions with Hamas,” a senior Turkish Foreign Ministry official told AFP.
AFP
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