Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz confronted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over his support for South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, accusing his country of having a “genocidal past” in relation to Armenians.
Katz said that Erdogan, who announced that he had sent documents to the ICJ to support the accusation of “genocide” against Israel, leads a country that “committed the Armenian genocide in the past” and that now “boasts about attacking Israel with baseless allegations.”
The Israeli minister said that Israel remembers the “Armenians and the Kurds”, and that Turkey’s history “speaks for itself”. He defended that Israel “protects, does not destroy”, in reference to the conflict against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.
Israel faces a genocide trial at the ICJ following a complaint filed by South Africa, which said the Jewish state violated the Genocide Convention by “attacking” the “civilian population” of Gaza in response to Hamas terrorist attacks. against its territory, which left around 1,200 people dead, which occurred on October 7 last year.
Turkey was an ally of Israel, but relations between the two deteriorated after the start of the conflict in Gaza, which Erdogan denounced as a “war crime”. Israel withdrew its ambassador from Ankara at the end of October, and Turkey sent a parliamentary delegation to The Hague to monitor the ICJ process.
Erdogan said he hopes the “documents he handed over to the court, including visual images, will serve to condemn Israel.” He criticized Israel's defense at the ICJ, saying the country “is not defending itself but attacking once again, having turned Palestine's open-air prison into a sea of blood.” (With EFE Agency)
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