As Turkey moves toward Sharia, it also moves toward jihad. “Gaza flotilla was ‘Turkish provocation’, Livni tells enquiry: Turkey exploitation of a diplomatic vacuum was behind the decision to launch aid convoy raided by Israel, opposition leader says,” by Barak Ravid for Haaretz, October 25:
Opposition leader Tzipi Livni testified before a commission probing Israel’s raid on a Gaza-bound aid convoy in May, telling the panel that Turkey had exploited the event as a provocation against Israel.
“In the absence of a peace process, with Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians unclear, Turkey was able to fill a political vacuum by engineering provocations,” Livni told the commission, headed by former Supreme Court Judge Jacob Turkel.
Nine Turkish activists were killed when Israeli naval commandos stormed the decks of the ‘Mavi Marmara’, the lead ship in the six-boat flotilla, at dawn on May 31. The raid plunged relations between Israel and Turkey, traditionally close military allies, into crisis.
The boats had been trying to break Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip, imposed in 2007 when Hamas militants seized power from rival Palestinian faction Fatah in a bloody coup, at a time when Livni was foreign minister….
On Sunday Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi testified to the commission for a second time, insisting the killings aboard the Mavi Marmara had been unavoidable.
Ashkenazi said Israeli commandos had fired 308 live bullets aboard the ship to repel passengers who attacked them with lethal weapons, including a snatched Uzi machine pistol.
Ashkenazi told the panel commission that navy commandos who boarded the Mavi Marmara were equipped with riot-dispersal gear, but quickly switched to live fire to confront armed passengers because “if they had not done this, there would have been more casualties”.