Turkey says it has seized 34 people who are alleged to have been involved in spying and planning abductions for Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.
Officials said 57 addresses were raided in Istanbul and elsewhere and they were still searching for 12 more suspects.
There was no immediate comment from Israel, but relations between the two countries have declined dramatically during Israel’s war with Hamas.
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya shared video of Operation Mole taking place.
He said authorities had moved in after they had decided that Israeli intelligence was seeking to carry out “tactical tasks such as reconnaissance, pursuit, assault, and kidnapping against foreign nationals residing in our country”.
Although he made no reference to Hamas, Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, issued a warning last month to Israel that it would be “doomed to pay a heavy price” if it tried to assassinate members of Hamas on Turkish soil.
Unlike the UK, US and EU, Turkey does not categorise Hamas as a terrorist organisation and for years has maintained ties with its leadership, hosting some of its members on Turkish soil.
President Erdogan has even described Hamas militants as “liberators who protect their land”.
In November, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant made clear that they would target Hamas chiefs wherever they were.
An undated recording was broadcast in Israel days later in which the head of Shin Bet domestic security, Ronen Bar, was heard saying the cabinet had set the agency the goal of eliminating Hamas.
“We will do this everywhere, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Qatar. It will take a few years but we will be there to do it,” he was quoted as saying.
The death of Hamas’s deputy political leader in Lebanon, Saleh al-Arouri, in an explosion in Beirut on Tuesday was immediately blamed on Israel by Lebanon’s Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah.
Video of some of the Turkish raids posted by the interior minister showed police bursting into people’s flats, handcuffing suspects and putting them into police cars.
However, this is not the first time Turkish officials have highlighted operations targeting purported Mossad agents.
In 2022, dozens of people were arrested on suspicion of spying on Palestinian citizens. Then last July, Turkey’s MIT intelligence agency named seven suspects it said had confessed to working for Mossad.
Turkish popular and political opinion is broadly behind the Palestinians and a big anti-Israel rally took place in the heart of Istanbul on Monday.
