The government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan bolstered its already warm relationship with the Hamas terrorist group over the weekend by granting Turkish citizenship to senior Hamas members, British newspaper The Telegraph reported. The move would allow them to travel freely and enable them to plot terrorist attacks on Israelis across the globe.
According to the report, seven of 12 Hamas operatives who use Turkey as their base of operations have received Turkish citizenship, as well as passports, while another five are in the process of receiving them. In some cases, the Hamas terrorists are living under Turkish aliases.
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"These are not foot soldiers but the most senior Hamas operatives outside of Gaza. [They] are actively raising funds and directing operatives to carry out attacks in the present day," a senior source in the region told The Telegraph.
"The Turkish Government gave in to pressure by Hamas to grant citizenship to its operatives, thereby allowing them to travel more freely, endangering other countries that have listed Hamas as a terror group," the source added.
A Turkish government spokesman declined to comment on what it described as baseless claims against Turkey by a foreign government.
Turkish passport holders are entitled to visa-free travel to Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Serbia, among other countries. Turkey is also lobbying to extend those privileges to EU countries, where Hamas is feared to be plotting attacks on Israeli citizens, The Telegraph reported.
"Granting [the Hamas members] citizenship coincides with Erdogan hosting the Hamas leadership at his palace," Dr. Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak, a researcher at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, told Israel Hayom.
"Erdogan is a disciple of the Muslim Brotherhood and when you look at the map of relations in the Middle East you see he is a partner with Qatar. The Turkey-Qatar-Hamas triangle consists of three strategic allies," said Cohen Yanarocak.
Meanwhile, within the context of diplomatic normalization between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Cohen Yanarocak said, "In the wake of the proxy war in Libya between Turkey and the UAE, Erdogan views [the UAE] as his enemy, and although he has an ambassador in Tel Aviv he is trying to exploit the [Israel-UAE] normalization agreement to present himself as the 'big boss' of the Palestinian cause."
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