Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, likening Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza to Nazi Germany’s mass killing of Jews.
“They used to speak ill of Hitler. What difference do you have from Hitler? They are going to make us miss Hitler. Is what this Netanyahu is doing any less than what Hitler did? It is not,” Erdogan said at an awards ceremony in capital Ankara on Wednesday.
“He is richer than Hitler, he gets the support from the West. All sorts of support comes from the United States. And what did they do with all this support? They killed more than 20,000 Gazans,” he said.
Netanyahu later responded by pointing to Turkey’s own history of alleged rights abuses.
“Erdogan, who commits genocide against the Kurds, who holds a world record for imprisoning journalists who oppose his rule, is the last person who can preach morality to us,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
The Turkish leader had previously called Israel a “terror state” with “unlimited” Western support in November.
However, Turkey has maintained commercial ties with Israel throughout its nearly three-month genocidal war on Gaza that has killed more than 21,000 people, wounded 55,000 others and displaced almost the entire 2.3 million population.
