Turkey’s interior minister vows to ‘liberate’ Jerusalem, return it to Turkish hands

Turkey’s interior minister on Saturday said that his country will one day bring about the “liberation” of Jerusalem, vowing to restore Turkish control to the city that the Ottoman Empire ruled for hundreds of years.

The comments drew sharp rebuke from Israel, with the Foreign Ministry saying that the “Ottoman Empire is gone” and that Jerusalem “shall remain the eternal capital of Israel.”

“Just as we witnessed the liberation of Damascus, Aleppo, and Karabakh, God willing, one day we will also witness the liberation of Jerusalem,” Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi said in a speech at a ruling AKP Party conference in the city of Çorum.

Çiftçi was referring to the December 2024 fall of the Assad regime in Syria at the hands of Turkish-backed rebel militants, and the 2023 Azerbaijani capture and expulsion of Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnically Armenian breakaway state that controlled much of western Azerbaijan for decades.

“Just as in the past, those lands will be ours once again,” he vowed, saying: “God willing, they will come under our sovereignty and dominion once more.”

“Because we have a global leader like [Turkish President] Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at our helm,” he said. “A world leader.”

After Çiftçi posted a clip of his speech on his X account, Israel’s Foreign Ministry issued a sharp rebuke, telling the senior minister to “wake up and smell the coffee.”

“The corrupt Ottoman Empire is gone. Forever,” the ministry said on X, adding that Jerusalem “shall remain the eternal capital of Israel. Forever.”

Defense Minister Israel Katz also joined in, saying: “To the Turkish Interior Minister who dreams of administering Jerusalem and hurls threats, I say this: Jerusalem is not Constantinople, and the State of Israel is not a crumbling Crusader Empire.”

“Israel is a strong and resolute state that has proven its capacity to defend itself against any threat,” Katz wrote in a Turkish-language statement on X.

“Jerusalem has been the capital of the Jewish people for 3,000 years and will remain Israel’s capital forever,” he said. “You and the Ottoman Empire that Erdoğan dreams of, on the other hand, have collapsed and will never return.”

“Unfortunately, you have learned nothing from the legacy of Atatürk, who worked to transform Turkey into a modern state; on the contrary, you are working to drag Turkey back into a dark and backward era,” Katz added.

Israel’s relations with Turkey, which were once the Jewish state’s strongest with any country in the region, have drastically deteriorated in recent years, especially since the start of the war in Gaza after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack.

Erdogan has since been one of the most harshly critical foreign leaders of Israel, accusing Jerusalem of genocide and war crimes, praising ICC arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, and calling on the UN to recommend the use of force against Israel.

Turkey regularly hosts Hamas leaders, and Erdogan has praised the group’s terrorists as freedom fighters while condemning Israel, including by comparing it to Nazi Germany and likening Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler. The country has also suspended trade with Israel, and Turkish air carriers have stopped flying to Israel.