ANKARA, Turkiye: Turkiye’s president on Tuesday dismissed an Israeli proposal to designate violence against Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I as genocide, and turned the accusation back at Israel by pointing at the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was responding to a measure approved Sunday by Israel’s Cabinet. The proposal still requires parliamentary approval and comes amid deteriorating ties between Israel and Turkiye.
Turkiye has fiercely lobbied to prevent countries from officially recognizing the mass deaths of Armenians around 1915 as genocide, even as Armenians have pushed for it.
Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkiye denies that the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.
“We pay absolutely no attention to the slanders against our country by this criminal network, which has the blood of 73,000 innocent people of Gaza, mostly children and women, on its hands,” Erdogan said in a televised address following a Cabinet meeting.
