The Palestinian President, Mahmud Abbas, is scheduled to visit Turkey next week for discussions on the Gaza conflict and reconciliation efforts among Palestinian factions, the Turkish Foreign Minister said on Sunday.
The visit coincides with ongoing diplomatic efforts to halt the conflict in the nearly five-month-long war between Israel and Hamas, which began after the Palestinian militant group’s attacks on October 7th.
Egypt, Qatar and the United States have mediated in weeks of talks to secure a truce by the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in a week.
Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said: “There is a serious desire and effort to reach a ceasefire before Ramadan,” in closing remarks to an annual diplomacy forum in the Mediterranean holiday resort of Antalya.
Fidan confirmed that Abbas would visit the Turkish capital Ankara on Tuesday at the invitation of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a vocal advocate of the Palestinian cause.
Both leaders would discuss “the developments in Palestine, the current course of the war as well as the intra-Palestinian” dialogue, Fidan said.
Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel, is a rival of Abbas’s Fatah faction that rules the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank.
It ousted Fatah from Gaza in 2007 following its landslide victory in the last Palestinian parliamentary elections the previous year.
Erdogan has become one of the harshest critics of Israel’s war in Gaza.
He has branded Israel a “terrorist state” and compared Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler while calling Hamas “a liberation group”.
