Turkish FM: Cyprus, Greece should ‘stay away’ from Middle East matters
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has suggested that Cyprus put itself in the way of becoming a target of Hezbollah, after the Lebanon-based militant group threatened the EU member-state that it would become “part of this war too,” if it allowed Israel to use its bases and airports.
“We are faced with a great threat and risk of expansion here. As long as Israel’s genocide continues, this risk will continue. We have been underlining this from the beginning,” Fidan said in an interview with Turkey’s Haberturk.
Cyprus, he suggested, “has turned into an operation center, after October 7. Following the first operations launched by Israel, we saw intelligence reports saying that the ‘Greek Cypriot Administration of Southern Cyprus’ has become a base used by certain countries, especially in operations against Gaza. That is, intelligence flights and military flights are constantly carried out of there for Gaza.”
Fidan went on to suggest that an international humanitarian aid corridor set up for getting food and medicine to the Palestinian people in Gaza via the Republic of Cyprus was a “logistics operation” that “has obviously turned into an activity that conceals the fact that it is actually a military base.”
He even went so far as to suggest that “the Greek islands are used for operations towards the Middle East,” warning that this will not “benefit the Greek Cypriot Administration nor Greece.”
“Our advice, we told the Greeks, is to stay away from these matters, because when you get involved in the ongoing wars in the Middle East in this way, when you become a party to it, the fire will come and find you, and we are in the same geography, so it will come and find us too.”
Fidan added that the “regional actors need to see that there is a big militarization there, it should be prevented so that nothing will happen here in the region.”
