BICOM

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that the presence of Israeli flags during celebrations of the “yes” vote in Kurdistan proves that Israel was involved in the vote.

Erdogan said that “this shows one thing; that this administration [the Kurdish leadership in northern Iraq] has a history with Mossad. They are hand-in-hand together”.

In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the weekly cabinet meeting that “I understand why those who support Hamas want to see the Mossad in every uncomfortable place, but Israel had no part in the referendum of the Kurdish people, apart from the deep, natural, longstanding sympathy of the people of Israel for the Kurdish people and their yearnings”.

Erdogan has met the former Hamas political chief, Khaled Mashaal, several times. Turkey also hosted Hamas officials until a normalisation agreement was signed with Israel in June 2016. The agreement ended a six-year diplomatic freeze, after an incident in 2010 when nine Turkish citizens were killed trying to prevent Israeli commandos taking control of a Gaza-bound protest ship, the Mavi Marmara.

This is the second incident of heightened tensions between Turkey and Israel since the Kurdish referendum on 25 September.

Last week, Erdogan advised Israel to “review” its support for Kurdish independence or risk jeopardising “a lot of steps that we were about to take with Israel”. He went on to say that “it is not possible for us to take steps with those who do not see Turkey as a playmaker in the region. Turkey is a playmaker in the region”.

The people of Iraqi Kurdistan voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence in the 25 September vote.

Israeli officials have been broadly supportive of the Kurdish drive for independence, with Netanyahu stating on 13 September that Israel “supports the legitimate efforts of the Kurdish people to achieve a state of their own”.

Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah described the referendum as part of a US-Israeli plot to carve up the region. He added that the two states threatened the whole region and that the referendum would “open the door to partition, partition, partition. Partition means taking the region to internal wars whose end and timeframe is known only to God”.