WarSclerotic

Turkey says ‘yes’ to Israeli eart… JPost – Diplomacy & Politics.

    Turkey on Tuesday finally accepted Israel’s earthquake aid, two days after a devastating temblor hit eastern Turkey, and following a number of rebuffed Israeli government offers of assistance.

According to a Foreign Ministry spokesman, the Turks made a request through Israel’s embassy in Ankara for Israel to send mobile homes to the devastated Van province where the earthquake hit.

The Defense Ministry chartered a civilian 747 plane Tuesday night to take seven mobile homes to Turkey on Wednesday. According to a Defense Ministry official, this will be the first of a number of planes that will be sent carrying aid.

The official would not comment on whether the reason a civilian plane was hired, and that an IDF transport plane was not being used, was because of a Turkish ban on Israeli military flights over Turkey since the Mavi Marmara incident in May 2010.

Since the earthquake hit on Sunday, both President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu contacted their Turkish counterparts and offered assistance.

At this point the Turks have not asked for Israeli personnel to help rescue and recovery efforts. After a massive earthquake there in 1999, Israel dispatched a  search and rescue team of some 250 people, plus a field hospital.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak set up a small team in the ministry on Tuesday to look at what other aid can be supplied, and how to best to get it there.

One foreign ministry source warned against reading any diplomatic significance in the Turkish acceptance of the Israeli assistance, saying all this showed was that there was a massive humanitarian tragedy in Turkey and a real need for help dealing with it. The number of dead in the earthquake rose Tuesday to over 430, with that number expected to grow in the coming days.

Turkey sent a firefighting airplane to Israel in December to help put out the Carmel Forest fire. This gesture did not lead to a breakthrough in thawing the tensions between Israel and Turkey, though initially there was some hope it would do so.

This entry was posted on October 25, 2011 at 11:33 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.