Physical Address
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President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan held a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who arrived in Türkiye on Wednesday and will be addressing the Turkish Parliament on Thursday.
The two leaders held a closed-door meeting at the Presidential Complex in Ankara.
Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and the Palestinian Ambassador Faed Mustafa welcomed Abbas at the airport.
Abbas’s speech is viewed as Türkiye’s response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s outrageous address to the U.S. Congress.
Erdoğan, who criticized Abbas for delaying his expected address, will be in the audience listening to Abbas. Palestinians injured in Israel’s attacks in Gaza and evacuated to Türkiye for treatment are also invited to the parliament for the session.
Parliament Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş, who formally extended an invitation to Abbas earlier, will chair the session where the Palestinian leader will appear. His speech is deemed important and experts say it can be a response to a notorious speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month at U.S. Congress, where he received a lengthy standing ovation while justifying his government’s war crimes against Palestinians.
Media outlets reported that high-security measures would be in place at the parliament for the occasion. Abbas rarely travels outside Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority is located, though the flareup of the Palestine-Israel conflict spurred renewed diplomacy to resolve longstanding issues, as well as maintaining ultimate unity between rival Fatah and Hamas factions. 88-year-old Abbas has reportedly postponed his visit to Türkiye due to health reasons. He last visited Türkiye for a three-day visit in March and met President Erdoğan. Erdoğan also brought together Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh, the political bureau chief of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, who was assassinated in Tehran recently, as a step toward reconciliation between Abbas’ Fatah and Hamas, which faces a brutal crackdown in Gaza.
