Turkey will cut ties with Israel unless it receives an apology over a deadly Is-raeli raid on a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza, the Tu-rkish foreign minister said, but Israel on Monday said it had no intention of doing so.
It was the first time Ankara has explicitly threatened to cut ties with Israel, having previously said it was reviewing relations with the Jewish state.
The public exchange between the two once close US regional allies followed talks last week by Turkish and Israeli officials aimed at mending fences. Instead, their positions appeared to have hardened. “Israel has three paths ahead: It either apologises, or accepts the findings from an international commission investigating the raid, or Turkey will cut off ties,” Turkey’s foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu told Monday’s edition of Hurriyet. Once Israel’s closest Muslim ally, Turkey has said several times it wants Israel to apologise over the May 31 raid, pay compensation, agree to a UN inquiry into the incident and lift the blockade of 1.6 million Palestinians living in Gaza Strip. Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said Israel has no intention of apologising. “We don’t have any intention to apologise. We think that the opposite is true,” he said during a visit to Latvia. Mr Davutoglu met Israel’s trade and industry minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer last week in Brussels in a bid to repair ties. Turkey said then it conveyed its demands to Israel but Mr Davutoglu told Hurriyet: “We will not wait forever for an answer.” “It will be enough if their own commission rules that the raid was unfair and they apologise in line with the commission’s verdict, but we have to see the verdict first,” Mr Davutoglu said.
Nine Turkish pro-Palestinian activists were killed when Israeli commandos stormed the Turkish-flagged ship Mavi Marmara as part of an operation to stop a relief aid flotilla headed for Israeli-blockaded Gaza. Turkey withdrew its ambassador to Israel, cancelled joint military operations and barred Israeli military aircraft from Turkish airspace after the incident.