Turkey’s Erdogan Urges UN to Recommend Use of Force if Security Council Doesn’t Stop Israel

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday that the United Nations General Assembly should recommend the use of force, in line with a resolution it passed in 1950, if the UN Security Council fails to stop Israel‘s military operations in Gaza and Lebanon.

NATO member Turkey has denounced Israel‘s campaign in Gaza against Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, and condemned its recent attacks in Lebanon targeting Hezbollah terrorists.

“The UN General Assembly should rapidly implement the authority to recommend the use of force, as it did with the 1950 Uniting for Peace resolution, if the Security Council can’t show the necessary will,” Erdogan said after a cabinet meeting in Ankara.

The resolution says the UN General Assembly can step in if disagreements among the Security Council’s five permanent veto-wielding powers — Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States — mean they fail to maintain international peace.

The Security Council is the only UN body that can normally make legally binding decisions, such as authorizing use of force and imposing sanctions.

Erdogan also said he was sad to see Muslim countries failing to take a more active stance against Israel, urging them to take economic, diplomatic, and political measures against Israel to pressure it into accepting a ceasefire.

“For the peace of everyone in our region, from Muslim to Jew to Christian, we call on the international community and Muslim world to mobilize,” Erdogan said, claiming Israel‘s attacks would target Muslim countries too if it is not stopped soon.

Turkey has been one of the fiercest critics of Israel and defenders of Hamas since the outbreak of the Gaza war in October.

Last month, Erdogan declared Aug. 2 a day of national mourning over the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

The announcement came days after Erdogan made an explicit threat to invade Israel, leading Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz to call on NATO to expel Turkey, which has the alliance’s second largest military.

Turkey has reportedly blocked cooperation between NATO and Israel since October because of the war in Hamas-ruled Gaza and said the alliance should not engage with Israel as a partner until the conflict ends.

Erdogan’s comments were the latest in a recent wave of hostile moves targeting the Jewish state.

Earlier this year, for example, Turkey’s foreign ministry compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

In May, the Turkish trade ministry said it had ceased all exports and imports to and from Israel. The announcement came after Turkey imposed trade restrictions on Israeli exports over Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza following the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 invasion of and massacre across the southern region of the Jewish state.

That followed Erdogan in March threatening to “send Netanyahu to Allah to take care of him, make him miserable, and curse him.” He previously accused Israel of operating “Nazi” concentration camps and compared Netanyahu with Hitler.

Weeks earlier, Erdogan said that Netanyahu was a “butcher” who would be tried as a “war criminal” over Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza. He has also called Israel a “terror state.”

Turkey hosts senior Hamas officials and, together with Iran and Qatar, has provided a large portion of the Palestinian terrorist group’s budget.

Several Western and Arab states designate Hamas, an offshoot of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, as a terrorist group.

However, Erdogan has defended Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” against what he described as an Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

Israel withdrew all its troops and civilian settlers from Gaza in 2005.

Turkish-Israeli diplomatic relations have nosedived since the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, when the terrorist group that rules Gaza murdered 1,200 people in southern Israel and kidnapped over 250 others as hostages, launching the ongoing war in the Palestinian enclave.

During an interview published last month, Turkey’s Ambassador to Iran Hicabi Kırlangıç lambasted Israel as “one of the most ruthless enemies” and condemned Western countries for supporting the Jewish state. He also said that Iran’s plan to attack Israel in retaliation for the July killing of Haniyeh in Tehran should be harsh enough to force the Jewish state to “fall to its knees.”

Iran backs both Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terrorist groups with weapons funding, and training.

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