Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), likened Israel's war against Hamas to the Holocaust on Wednesday and said that Israel will make you "miss Hitler."
Erdogan has been a vocal critic of Israel's military operation in Gaza, calling the country a "terror state." The Turkish president is a supporter of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On October 7, Hamas led the deadliest Palestinian militant attack on Israel in history. Israel subsequently launched its heaviest-ever airstrikes on Gaza. Israeli officials have said that 1,200 people in Israel were killed in Hamas' attack, according to the Associated Press, while more than 21,100 Palestinians have been killed, officials from the health ministry in Gaza said.
Turkey does not view Hamas as a terrorist organization, unlike many of its fellow NATO allies such as the U.S., Canada and European Union (EU). A total of 22 countries of the 31 in NATO are also a part of the EU.
Erdogan compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to that of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's treatment of the Jews and other marginalized groups in the 1940s. The Nazi party and their collaborators killed about 6 million Jewish men, women and children, along with millions of non-Jewish people, during World War II.
"They used to speak ill of Hitler. What difference do you have from Hitler? They are going to make us miss Hitler. Is what this [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is doing any less than what Hitler did? It is not," Erdogan said on Wednesday at an awards ceremony in Ankara, Turkey's capital.
"He is richer than Hitler, he gets the support from the West. All sorts of support comes from the United States. And what did they do with all this support? They killed more than 20,000 Gazans."
Newsweek reached out to the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey via email and Netanyahu's office via online form for comment.
In response to Erdogan's comments, Netanyahu called out the Turkish president for his own alleged mistreatment of the Kurdish people, an Iranic ethnic group.
"Erdogan, who is committing genocide against the Kurds and who holds the world record for imprisoning journalists who oppose his regime, is the last person who can preach morality to us," Netanyahu said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday.
"The IDF, which is the most moral army in the world, is fighting to eliminate the most abhorrent and brutal terrorist organization in the world, Hamas-ISIS, which has committed crimes against humanity, and which Erdogan has praised and whose leaders he hosts."
In October 2019, Turkey launched a military offensive into northeastern Syria to drive Kurdish forces away from its border. The region is controlled by the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG).
Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organization while the U.S. considers the Kurd forces an ally in the war against ISIS, a jihadist militant group.
Turkey launched airstrikes and artillery fire into Syria just days after the U.S. announced it was pulling troops out of the region. The Trump administration defended the decision at the time, saying they were prioritizing the safety of American soldiers amid Turkey's incursion.
"Our aim is to destroy the terror corridor which is trying to be established on our southern border and to bring peace and peace to the region," Erdogan said in a Twitter post at the beginning of the operation.
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