Is Turkey Hamas' new headquarters?
Turkey’s pernicious foreign policy could generate unintended consequences with Hamas, Israel and the West.
On Aug. 20, at the Association of Muslim Scholars conference in Istanbul, senior Hamas official Salach al-Aruri accepted the long-denied charges that Hamas had kidnapped the three Israeli teenagers on June 12. Their bodies were found at the end of June. From the very beginning, Israel said that the kidnapping and murders were carried out by Hamas.
All along, Hamas has denied its involvement vehemently. Al-Monitor’s Palestine Pulse reported that many Palestinians believe Israelis “orchestrated the kidnapping and murders” to justify an attack on the Gaza Strip. The same conspiracy theory was widely supported in Turkey, too. It is safe to assume that the majority of Turks do not believe the news of Aruri’s acceptance of involvement despite the video recording. Most Turkish pundits are convinced Hamas had no direct involvement, and that the kidnapping and murders of the three teenagers was nothing but an Israeli conspiracy.
However, speaking from Istanbul, Aruri asserted that the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades' mujahedeen carried out the kidnapping to show solidarity with Palestinians on hunger strike in Israeli prisons. In an interview with Yahoo News on Aug. 22, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal did not deny Aruri’s contention, and only emphasized that it was carried out without the knowledge of the political wing. Fars News Agency promptly denied the news about Aruri’s revelations as false.
Given all this, why does Turkey, a NATO member country, host Hamas operatives, have high-level meetings with them and support their rhetoric? Hamas is on the list of terrorist organizations of the United States, the European Union, Canada and several other countries, but not on that of the UN Security Council and it is not considered a terrorist organization in Turkey. Therefore, it is safe to say most, if not all, of Turkey’s Western allies considers Hamas a terror organization.
