The authoritarian Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has long played host to leaders of Hamas, is now allowing the terror group’s operatives to plot terror attacks while on Turkish soil, a report said late Tuesday.
According to the British daily The Telegraph, citing Israeli police sources and offering a wealth of details, recent interrogations of terror suspects by Israeli officials revealed that Hamas operations in Jerusalem and the West Bank are being actively directed from Istanbul, while Turkish authorities turn a blind eye.
One such operation cited by the paper was a plot to assassinate senior Israeli officials, including the mayor of Jerusalem and the national police commissioner, by 23-year-old East Jerusalem resident Adham Muselmani, who was recruited to the cause in a meeting in Istanbul.
The report comes shortly after Erdogan hosted Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Istanbul on Saturday, telling him, “We will keep on supporting our brothers in Palestine.”
Hamas in turn praised Turkey for its “positions vis-a-vis the Palestinian people and its just cause” in a news report on its website.
Israel has long complained to Ankara about its ties to Hamas, but to no avail, according to the report. Israeli officials told The Telegraph that Turkey has now reneged on its 2015 commitment, negotiated by the US, not to allow Hamas officials to plot terror attacks against the Jewish state from its territory.
“Israel is extremely concerned that Turkey is allowing Hamas terrorists to operate from its territory, in planning and engaging in terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians,” the paper quoted Israel’s Foreign Ministry as saying.
According to the paper, Muselmani, who was arrested by the Shin Bet while trying to purchase a pistol, had met with a handler in Istanbul, who suggested he try to kill then Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat, then-MK and Temple Mount activist Yehuda Glick, or then-police chief Roni Alsheich.
The handler, senior Hamas operative Zacharia Najib, who was released by Israel as part of a 2011 deal that freed IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, offered another person weapons training in Istanbul for an attack in Israel.
The Telegraph also described police transcripts that included a Palestinian imam meeting in Istanbul with Hamas operative Hisham Hijaz in Istanbul, another Shalit deal releasee. Hijaz offered $20,000 in the meeting to the family of anyone who carried out a suicide bombing in Israel.
The paper noted that contacts between Turkish and Hamas officials are ongoing and intimate, with Turkish intelligence agency MIT working closely with the main conduit for the relationship, Hamas official Jihad Ya’amor.
Turkey has long maintained warm ties with Hamas, which have grown more overt as ties with Israel have chilled over the last decade.
Hamas and Erdogan’s AKP party are linked politically. Both have close ideological ties to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movement.
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