President Erdoğan is participating in the summit on the ceasefire agreement reached in Gaza. He is scheduled to deliver a speech at the summit and hold consultations with the leaders of the participating countries.
Earlier, Erdogan said that "Turkish aid trucks have begun arriving in the Gaza Strip," stressing that the first step toward achieving lasting peace in Gaza had been taken in recent days after two years of genocide.
In a speech delivered at the opening ceremony of several projects in the Turkish province of Trabzon, he added, "Palestinians in Gaza breathed a sigh of relief for the first time, albeit with bitterness and wounded hearts, after the ceasefire agreement." He explained that "children's faces began to smile, and civilians displaced by Israeli airstrikes returned to the areas they were forced to leave."
The Turkish President stressed the need to ensure Israel's commitment to the agreement it signed, and not allow it to back out of the agreement, as it has repeatedly done in the past, under any pretext.
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had reached an agreement on the first phase of his ceasefire and prisoner exchange plan, following indirect negotiations between the two sides in Sharm el-Sheikh, with the participation of Turkey, Egypt, and Qatar, and under US supervision.
Since October 8, 2023, Israel, with US support, has been committing a two-year genocide in Gaza, including killing, starvation, destruction, and forced displacement. It has ignored all international appeals and orders from the International Court of Justice to halt the operation, resulting in 67,806 martyrs and 170,066 wounded, according to a statistical report from the Ministry of Health in Gaza released Sunday.
In addition to the martyrs and wounded, most of whom were children and women, the genocide left more than 9,500 missing, hundreds of thousands displaced, and a famine that claimed the lives of 463 Palestinians, including 157 children.
