Ece Toksabay and Ali Kucukgocmen
Updated Wed, October 18, 2023
Pro-Palestinian protest near the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul
By Ece Toksabay and Ali Kucukgocmen
ANKARA (Reuters) -Turkish protesters staged fresh anti-Israel demonstrations on Wednesday as Turkey was set to declare three days of mourning following a blast that killed large numbers of Palestinians at a Gaza hospital.
Palestinian officials said the blast at Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital was caused by an Israeli air strike. Israel blamed the blast on a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, which denied responsibility.
President Tayyip Erdogan called the explosion "the latest example of Israeli attacks devoid of the most basic human values".
Turkey's presidential communications office quickly branded Israel's claim "#FakeNews" on social media platform X.
Erdogan declared three days of mourning in Turkey late on Wednesday for the Palestinians killed at the hospital in Gaza.
Overnight Turks marched with Palestinian flags and chanted slogans denouncing Israel in at least a dozen Turkish cities, including outside the Israeli embassy in the capital Ankara.
Police used pepper spray and water cannon to disperse thousands of protesters who tried to enter the compound of Israel's consulate in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city. Five people were detained, the Istanbul governor's office said.
Israel's National Security Council (NSC) issued a warning against travel to Turkey, citing fears that Israelis would be targeted by those angry at the war. It also urged Israeli citizens in Turkey to leave as soon as possible.
Following the NSC's appeal, Israeli airlines arranged flights from Istanbul late on Wednesday for Israelis who want to leave Turkey.
"I want to be at home. That's all," an Israeli woman, who declined to give her name, told Reuters while queuing for the flight check-in at Istanbul Airport.
On Wednesday, there was a large security presence around the consulate, with hundreds of police officers and around 10 water cannon vehicles deployed behind a line of metal barriers. Police conducted identity checks on those seeking to pass through.
Protesters held fresh demonstrations near consulates of Israel and the United States in Istanbul on Wednesday evening. In Ankara, a few hundred protesters marched following a symbolic funeral prayer held for those killed in the hospital.
The U.S. consulate in southern city of Adana will remain closed until further notice and U.S. government personnel have been instructed to minimise movements in Turkey due to protests, the U.S. Embassy in Ankara said in a statement.
Political analysts said the Gaza hospital blast could have dire consequences for ties between Israel and Turkey.
"Ankara is now likely to assume a much harder anti-Israel stance...," said Wolfango Piccoli at Teneo.
"Erdogan may even decide to abandon the rapprochement with Israel, which was initiated in 2022 after more than 10 years of fraught ties between the two countries... A deterioration in relations between Turkey and Israel would also likely impact Turkey-U.S. ties, creating further stress between the two NATO allies at a volatile time."
(Reporting by Ece Toksabay, Mert Ozkan and Huseyin Hayatsever in Ankara, Bulent Usta, Dilara Senkaya, Daren Butler, Ali Kucukgocmen, Umit Bektas and Mehmet Emin Caliskan in Istanbul, Steven Scheer in Jerusalem; Editing by Gareth Jones and Sandra Maler)
SAMY MAGDY and JOSEPH KRAUSS
Updated Wed, October 18, 2023
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Lebanon US Israel Palestinians
Protesters try to remove barbed wires that block a road leading to the U.S. embassy, during a demonstration in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza, in Aukar, a northern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2023. Hundreds of angry protesters are clashing with Lebanese security forces in the Lebanese suburb Aukar near the United States Embassy to support Gaza in its ongoing war with Israel. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
CAIRO (AP) — Within hours after a blast was said to have killed hundreds at a Gaza hospital, protesters hurled stones at Palestinian security forces in the occupied West Bank and at riot police in neighboring Jordan, venting fury at their leaders for failing to stop the carnage.
A summit planned in Jordan on Wednesday between U.S. , Jordan's King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi and Palestinian was canceled after Abbas withdrew in protest.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had spent much of the past week meeting with Arab leaders to try to ease tensions, but those efforts are now in doubt following the hospital blast. The raw nerve of decades of Palestinian suffering, left exposed by U.S.-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states, is throbbing once again, threatening broader unrest.
“This war, which has entered a dangerous phase, will plunge the region into an unspeakable disaster,” warned Abdullah, who is among the closest Western allies in the Mideast.
There were conflicting claims of who was responsible for the hospital blast. Officials in Gaza quickly blamed an Israeli airstrike. Israel denied it was involved and released a flurry of video, audio and other information that it said showed the blast was due to a rocket misfire by Islamic Jihad, another militant group operating in Gaza. Islamic Jihad dismissed that claim.
The Associated Press has not independently verified any of the claims or evidence released by the parties.
Biden, speaking in Tel Aviv, said the blast appeared to have been caused “by the other team,” not Israel.
But there was no doubt among the Arab protesters who gathered in several countries late Tuesday to condemn what they saw as an Israeli atrocity.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which has been under lockdown since a bloody Oct. 7 rampage by Hamas militants ignited the war, protesters clashed with Palestinian security forces and called for the overthrow of Abbas.
Israel and the West have long viewed Abbas as a partner in reducing tensions, but his Palestinian Authority is widely seen by Palestinians as a corrupt and autocratic accomplice to Israel's military occupation of the West Bank.
Jordan, long considered a bastion of stability in the region, has seen mass protests in recent days. Late Tuesday, pro-Palestinian protesters tried to storm the Israeli Embassy.
“They are all normalizing Arab rulers, none of them are free, the free ones are all dead!" one protester shouted. "Arab countries are unable to do anything!”
Egypt was the first Arab country to make peace with Israel, in the late 1970s. Jordan followed in 1994.
Thousands of students rallied at Egyptian universities on Wednesday to condemn Israeli strikes on Gaza. Protesters in Cairo, Alexandria and other cities chanted “Death to Israel” and “With our souls, with our blood, we sacrifice for you, Al-Aqsa,” referring to a contested Jerusalem holy site. A smaller protest was held near the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday.
Such protests are rare in Egypt, where authorities have clamped down on dissent for over a decade. But fears that Israel could push Gaza's 2.3 million residents into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, and soaring consumer prices due to runaway inflation, could prove a volatile mix in the country, where a popular uprising toppled a U.S.-backed autocrat in 2011.
Protests also erupted in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has traded fire with Israeli forces at the border, threatening to enter the war with its massive arsenal of rockets. Hundreds of protesters clashed with Lebanese security forces on Wednesday near the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, where riot police lobbed dozens of tear gas cannisters and fired water cannons to disperse demonstrators.
Protests have also been held in Morocco and Bahrain, two countries that forged diplomatic ties with Israel three years ago as part of the Abraham Accords.
“The Arab street has a voice. That voice may have been ignored in the past by governments in the region and the West … but they cannot do this anymore,” said Badr al-Saif, a history professor at Kuwait University. “People are on fire.”
As recently as a couple of weeks ago, the regional outlook seemed far different.
In his address to the U.N. General Assembly last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that the Abraham Accords, in which four Arab states normalized relations with Israel in 2020, were a “pivot of history” that “heralded the dawn of a new age of peace.”
He said Israel was “at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough" — a historic agreement with Saudi Arabia that the Biden administration had been focused on in recent months.
The Abraham Accords, with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, were reached with autocratic leaders willing to set aside the Palestinian issue in order to secure their own benefits from the U.S. The UAE hoped for advanced fighter jets. Morocco won U.S. support for its claim to Western Sahara, and Sudan's ruling military junta got longstanding U.S. sanctions lifted.
Saudi Arabia had asked for a U.S. defense pact and aid in establishing a civilian nuclear program, as well as a substantial concession to the Palestinians that the Saudis have yet to publicly spell out.
Shimrit Meir, who served as a diplomatic adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, said “time will tell” what impact the war will have on normalization efforts.
“In the short term, they will suffer, especially the hope for a breakthrough" with Saudi Arabia, she said. “In the longer run, Israel’s appeal and value to these countries comes from its military strength. Therefore, the need for it to restore its deterrence is above any other considerations.”
Despite all the high-level diplomacy, ordinary Arabs and Muslims still express strong solidarity with the Palestinian cause. During last year's World Cup soccer tournament, for example, Palestinian flags were waved in abundance even though the national team did not compete.
The recent devastation in Gaza has stirred those sentiments again.
“No Arab government is able to extend its hand to Israel amid its aggression on the Palestinians,” said Ammar Ali Hassan, an Egyptian political scientist.
“The Arab peoples won’t accept such a move. Even the rulers wouldn’t benefit from such ties at this time."
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Krauss reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut and Amy Teibel in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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