Israeli minister slams Turkey after foreign minister meets with new Hamas leader

Turkey's foreign minister sitting down with the man now running Hamas isn't some diplomatic gray area. It's a photo op with an organization that spent October 7th on video. Amichai Chikli's line about Ankara becoming "the command center for Hamas's rapists and murderers" is harsh, sure, but read the room. Erdoğan has spent years positioning himself as Hamas's patron on the world stage, and this meeting is just the latest confirmation that it's not posturing for a domestic audience anymore.

What's strange is how little surprise this generates in Western capitals. Turkey is a NATO member. It sits in the same alliance as the United States, hosts American nuclear weapons, and gets treated as a normal security partner in most of Washington's planning documents. Yet its foreign ministry can host a Hamas leader days after that same organization is still holding hostages and expect the usual diplomatic shrug. That gap between formal alliance status and actual behavior keeps getting wider, and nobody in Brussels or Foggy Bottom seems eager to close it.

We've said before that America's alliances need to mean something again, not just exist as paperwork from the Cold War. If Ankara wants to play footsie with a terrorist organization's leadership, that's a choice with consequences, or at least it should be. Israel calling it out directly is more honest than the mealy-mouthed statements we'd expect out of the State Department on a similar day.

None of this requires abandoning Turkey entirely; it's a real country with real strategic weight. But pretending this meeting was just routine diplomacy insults everyone who's been paying attention since October 7th.