Turkey confirms it blocked Israel over Gaza

[faceless]

Turkey confirms it barred Israel from military exercise because of Gaza war
Israel-Turkey relations damaged as multinational war games are cancelled
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
guardian.co.uk,
Monday 12 October 2009

Turkey's foreign minister has confirmed that his government cancelled joint military exercises, due to start today with Israel, because of concerns over Gaza. The move is a clear sign the offensive 10 months ago is still causing the Jewish state diplomatic damage.

Just days before the Nato air exercises with Israel were due to begin in Turkey's Anatolian region, Ankara told the Israeli military it was no longer invited to attend. As a result, the US and Italy also opted not to take part and the war games were called off. Turkey initially said the cancellation had been a "technical matter" but the foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, told CNN today: "We hope the situation in Gaza will be improved, that the situation will be back to the diplomatic track. And that will create a new atmosphere in Turkish-Israeli relations as well. But in the existing situation, of course, we are criticising this approach, [the] Israeli approach."

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, expressed his outrage at the Gaza offensive, launched last December in retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks, at the World Economic Forum in Davos the following month, storming out of a session with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres. The Israeli media noted that while Erdogan's government had long made its displeasure clear, what was new about Israel's exclusion from this week's "Anatolian Eagle" exercises was the role of the Turkish military, which had been closer to Israel than the civilian government.

The Israeli cabinet had an emergency meeting over the weekend to discuss the damage to Israel's most important military relationship in the region. "It may be that the reality has changed and the strategic ties that we thought existed have simply ended," a senior Israeli official told Haaretz newspaper. Israeli defence officials told the Jerusalem Post they were rethinking arms sales to Turkey and would end support for Turkey in its efforts to stop the US Congress voting to declare the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks a genocide.

Israel's "Cast Lead" offensive on Gaza, launched on 27 December, killed more than 1,100 Palestinians and left thousands more homeless. A report last month by the UN's human rights council said both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes but directed its strongest condemnation against Israel.

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Good on the Turks, though I wonder when this military exercise was planned?