On Tuesday, Turkey declared that it had arrested 33 individuals who were allegedly preparing kidnappings and spying for Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.
The individuals were apprehended during operations throughout Istanbul and seven other regions, according to Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya.
Whether they were residents of Israel or nationalities working for Mossad was not immediately apparent.
Video footage of armed security service agents smashing down doors and handcuffing suspects in their houses was made public by Yerlikaya’s office.
Thirteen more suspects, according to the Istanbul public prosecutor’s office, are still at large.
The raids occurred several weeks after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened Israel with “serious consequences” if it tried to target Hamas members who were employed by or resided in Turkey.
“There is an insidious operation and sabotage attempts being made against Turkey and its interests,” Erdogan said after the raids were announced.
“We will definitely destroy this game,” he said in televised remarks.
After the battle in Gaza began about three months ago, ties between Israel and Turkey collapsed.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is now the target of some of the toughest criticism in the world from Erdogan.
Last week, the president of Turkey likened Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler and urged Israel’s Western friends to stop endorsing the “terrorism” that Israeli troops are carrying out in Gaza.
Erdogan has also called for the trial of Israeli political figures and generals before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and he has called back Ankara’s envoy to Tel Aviv.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators participated in one of Turkey’s largest anti-Israel demonstrations of the conflict on Monday, organized by the president’s Islamic conservative AKP party.
End of thaw
The conflict in Gaza put a halt to a thawing process in Turkish-Israeli ties that concluded with the ambassadors’ reappointment in 2022.
The long-stalled negotiations between Israel and Turkey on a massive natural gas pipeline project that would have changed the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East have now resumed.
In 2022, Israel expressed gratitude to Turkey for apprehending a group of Turkish and Iranian individuals who were purportedly plotting to kill and abduct Israeli visitors in Istanbul.
In September, Erdogan and Netanyahu had a quick meeting outside the UN in New York, when they discussed scheduling a formal summit this year.
Periodically, the Turkish MIT intelligence organization raids large cities like Ankara and Istanbul, allegedly targeting Israeli agents.
Most are accused of conducting surveillance work on Palestinians living in Turkey.
Istanbul served as one of Hamas’s foreign political offices until the outbreak of the Gaza war.
Days after terrorists carried out attacks into southern Israel on October 7 that resulted in the deaths of about 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data, Turkey formally asked Hamas officials to depart.
About 250 individuals were also held captive by the Islamists. More over half of them, according to Israeli officials, are still in Gaza.
Since October 7, Israel’s unrelenting military operation, which it claims is intended to destroy Hamas, has killed almost 22,000 people in Gaza, the majority of them were women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Concerns about the escalating humanitarian crisis that Gaza’s 2.4 million residents—the majority of whom are displaced and camped out in makeshift shelters and tents due to acute food shortages—are confronting have been raised by UN organizations.