US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, was hardly given a warm welcome in Turkey this morning, starting with a snub by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was visiting his family’s hometown of Rize, The Guardian reported.
Instead, Blinken met with Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, and was greeted by protests outside the foreign ministry in Ankara, and amid news of demonstrators attempting to storm an air base in southern Turkey housing US troops.
Blinken wrapped up a West Asia diplomatic tour in Turkey after only limited success in his diplomatic efforts to forge a regional consensus in staying silent against the Zionist Israeli regime's aggression on the Gaza Strip.
Blinken met in the Turkish capital of Ankara with Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan early on Monday after his trip to the Occupied Territories, Jordan, the West Bank, Iraq and Cyprus.
Neither Blinken nor Fidan spoke as they posed for photographers ahead of their formal talks in Ankara, Israeli regime media reported. The top US diplomat was not going to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been highly critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and an outlier among NATO allies in not expressing full support for Israel’s aggression.
The Zionist Israeli regime launched an aggression on Gaza Strip in Palestine on October 7 following the Hamas-led attack on southern the Occupied Lands known as the Al-Aqsa Storm Operation during which it killed more than 1,400 Zionist regime soldiers and armed settlers and taking more than 200 of them to the besieged enclave as prisoners of war.
The death toll continues to mount in the Gaza Strip, which has been reeling from a month of relentless Israeli attacks and a tightened siege.
Nearly 9,800 Palestinians, most of them women and children have been killed in 30 days of Israeli attacks on Gaza.
MNA