Turkey’s top diplomat to address UN on Israel’s attacks on Palestine
ANKARA
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu will address the U.N. General Assembly on May 20 where Israel’s ongoing attacks on the Palestinians, which have already killed hundreds of people, will be discussed.
According to a statement issued by the Foreign Ministry, Çavuşoğlu will travel to New York with his Palestinian, Pakistani and Tunisian counterparts. The General Assembly will get convened under the leadership of Volkan Bozkır, a former senior Turkish diplomat who is now serving as president of the U.N. General Assembly.
Çavuşoğlu will address the General Assembly and hold bilateral meetings with his counterparts, the ministry stated.
Turkey has recently intensified its diplomatic initiatives to stop the Israeli offensive against the Palestinians. With the failure of the U.N. Security Council in ending the turbulence, Turkey has exerted efforts to convene the General Assembly just like it did in 2017 in reaction to the U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.
In an address to the Turkish Parliament on May 18, Çavuşoğlu reiterated that Ankara will never stop supporting the Palestinian cause.
“Under the leadership of our president [Recep Tayyip Erdogan], and with the power vested in us by our parliament, we will never give up supporting the Palestinian cause,” Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu told lawmakers in parliament.
“Turkey is pioneering diplomatic efforts on the Palestine issue and will continue to be the voice of conscience and justice in the world,” he said. Asserting that the atmosphere in Turkey on the Palestine issue was one that was of joint solidarity, Çavuşoğlu said: “We need to be sensitive on preserving this.”
“It is the duty of all of us to be careful not to carry this issue into the competitive language of domestic politics and not to make oppressed people happy who have the same mentality as [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” he said.
He said that the international community’s reaction to Israel’s attacks on Palestine was “weak” and added that some countries “closed their eyes to the war crimes” committed by Tel Aviv as they “put Israel’s security first.”
