Top Turkish newspaper calls for annihilation of Israel

Newspaper aligned with ruling Turkish party runs front page article advocating for the destruction of Israel, after President Erdogan called Israeli premier ‘Hitler’ from the podium of the UN.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A Turkish paper considered close to the regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan plastered a headline across its front page Sunday that said “The world will not be safe until Israel is destroyed.”

The article in Yeni Safak came as a direct response to the IDF assassination Friday night of Hezbollah terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah in his bunker in Beirut.

The paper claimed that “images of the moment and aftermath of the attack revealed that Israel does not care about any moral code” accusing it of committing a “massacre” as “dozens of civilians” allegedly lost their lives in the airstrike.

Israel has not commented on any civilian casualties who might have been caught in the bombing. The Jewish state had warned Lebanese citizens days ago to leave areas where Hezbollah terrorists were located, for their own safety.

The IDF did say that several other terrorists were caught in the airstrike, which reportedly used some 80 one-ton bombs, including a few senior members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, Hezbollah’s chief backer and paymaster.

The paper went on to list many of the senior Hezbollah, Hamas and Iranian military commanders that the IDF has recently eliminated, castigating the world for remaining silent over “all these acts of terror.”

It did not mention that the reason for Israel’s actions was the Hamas’ invasion of Israel and massacre of 1,200 people on October 7 that sparked the ongoing war in Gaza, and that Hezbollah has rained some 10,000 missiles, rockets and UAVs on the Jewish state since October 8 to support Hamas, acting as if Israel had decided out of the blue to attack its neighbors.

Yeni Safak’s unfounded charges against Israel also included that it was committing “genocide in Gaza,” that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now intends to “start a major regional war,” and that Nasrallah had been assassinated “under the name of the ‘New Order,’ with the “goal of [re]designing the region.”

The phrase “New Order” cannot help but remind the world of Adolf Hitler’s use of the slogan for Nazi Germany.

Turkish President Recep Erdogan often called Netanyahu “Hitler,” even before the Israel-Hamas war began, but revved up his use of the epithet in recent months as his government’s strident pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel rhetoric has increased over the course of the war.

On Wednesday, during his speech to the UN at the opening of the General Assembly, he again made the odious comparison when claiming that Israel was committing “massacres” in Gaza.

“Just as Hitler was stopped by an alliance of humanity seventy years ago, Netanyahu and his murder network must be stopped by an alliance of humanity,” he said.

The media in Turkey is almost completely under the thumb of the government. Turkey is among the world’s worst offenders in imprisoning journalists who don’t toe its political line, according to Reporters Without Border, with nearly 50 detained over the course of 2023.

Adolf HitlerBenjamin NetanyahuIsrael-Hamas warIsrael-Turkey relationsPresident Erdoğan