Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan who is on a landmark visit to Egypt has said that his country is ready to cooperate with Egypt to rebuild Gaza.
Erdogan’s Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said that both sides were turning a “new leaf” in their relations after over a decade of estrangement.
Humanitarian aid and an immediate ceasefire in Gaza topped the agenda, and Erdogan who is a vocal critic of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said that Turkey would “cooperate and stand in solidarity with our Egyptian brothers to put an end to the bloodshed in Gaza”.
“We agreed on the need for an immediate ceasefire [in Gaza] and the need to achieve calm in the West Bank to relaunch Israeli-Palestinian peace talks with the ultimate goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state,” el-Sisi said.
Palestine and Gaza have been at the centre of both the country’s foreign policy over the years.
Since 1979, Egypt and Israel have had full diplomatic relations, while Turkey has been less friendly with Israel.
Erodgan has consistently reiterated his stance of an independent Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.
The chequered past
In 2013, relations between Ankara and Cairo broke down after Egypt’s then-army chief El-Sisi led a coup to oust Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Mursi, an ally of Turkey.
After years, both the presidents used the 2022 World Cup in Qatar as the stage to be photographed shaking hands before appointing ambassadors in July 2023.
Since then, they have met in several other countries, including Saudi Arabia in November and at the G20 summit in India.
Both the countries have been on opposite sides in regional conflicts, from supporting rival parliaments in Libya’s civil war to taking opposing sides on the blockade of Qatar.
Despite the long freeze in relations, trade between the two continued flourished. According to Egyptian central bank figures, Turkey is Egypt’s fifth largest trade partner.
