JERUSALEM. Israel and Turkey agreed this week to restore diplomatic relations after years of antipathy stemming from a deadly confrontation between Israeli commandos and Turkish activists aboard a ship trying to break Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip, a senior Israeli official said.
Navy commandos killed nine activists during the violent clash in 2010 aboard the Mavi Marmara, part of a Turkish flotilla seeking to break the blockade. Another activist aboard the ship died of his wounds later.
The Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the reconciliation deal was not yet signed, said that Israel would create a compensation fund for the families of those killed on the Mavi Marmara.
Turkey, in turn, will drop criminal charges against Israeli officers and prevent a leader of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that controls Gaza, from entering Turkey.
The two countries would also return ambassadors to each other’s capitals, and discuss building a pipeline to bring natural gas from Israel to Turkey, the Israeli official said.
The rapprochement comes more than two and a half years after President Obama prompted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to call Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then the prime minister of Turkey, and apologize for the Marmara episode. That celebrated phone call, at the end of a 2013 visit by Mr. Obama to Israel, was supposed to have paved the way for reconciliation. Instead, it was one of many false starts as Israel and Turkey could not agree on terms.
The Israeli official said that the pending agreement grew out of a recent meeting in Switzerland between Mr. Netanyahu’s national security adviser, Yossi Cohen; a special Israeli envoy, Joseph Ciechanover; and Feridun Sinirlioglu, an official with the Turkish Foreign Ministry. On Sunday, Mr. Erdogan, who is now the president, told reporters that reconciliation “would be good for us, Israel, Palestine and the entire region.”
The Israeli Newspaper Haaretz reported that the compensation fund would be $20 million, but Emmanuel Nahshon, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said the total sum had not been finalized.
Credit: New York Times
