AFP , Sunday 28 Jun 2026
Turkey on Sunday lashed out at Israel after it recognised massacres of Armenians during World War I as genocide, branding it as a “political” decision to cover its own crimes.
“The Israeli government, which has systematically persecuted the Palestinian people before the eyes of the entire world and is being tried at the International Court of Justice on charges of committing genocide against the people of Gaza, is seeking to cover up its own crimes through the political decision it has adopted regarding the events of 1915,” said a foreign ministry statement.
Relations between Israel and Turkey have sharply deteriorated since the Gaza war erupted in October 2023. Israel’s war on the Strip has killed over 73,000 Palestinians and wounded over 173,000 others, according to health authorities.
Turkey has suspended all trade with Tel Aviv over the Gaza war and clashed with Israel over Tel Aviv’s expanding military occupation and illegal incursions across Syria. “Turkey will continue to work resolutely to bring an end to Israel’s expansionist and destabilising policies in the region,” the Turkish foreign ministry stated.
At the same time, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one of Israel’s fiercest critics, has regularly accused Israel of committing genocide in the Palestinian territory and compared Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to Nazi officials.
Multiple international bodies have recognized that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Most recently, a June 2026 UN commission of inquiry found that Israel continues to commit genocide by deliberately targeting Palestinian children, with 20,000 killed and 44,000 injured since October 2023.
This builds directly upon an earlier UN commission inquiry in September 2025, which found Israel guilty of four out of five acts specified under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Major human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders, have independently reached the same conclusion.
Despite denying its own genocide against Palestinians, the Israeli Cabinet unanimously approved a resolution recognizing the World War I massacres of Armenians as genocide.
The Armenians seek international recognition that the mass killings of their people under the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1917 amounted to genocide.
They say 1.5 million died, but Turkey strongly denies the accusation of genocide and says that both Armenians and Turks died as a result of the First World War. It puts the death toll in the hundreds of thousands.
The killings have been recognised as genocide by more than two dozen countries, including the United States, France and Germany.
Armenia and Turkey have no diplomatic ties, but the two have signalled interest in warming relations in recent years.
*This story was edited by Ahram Online.
—