2 Israelis said arrested in Turkey in unclear circumstances

Two Israeli have been arrested in Turkey under circumstances that were not immediately clear, the Kan state broadcaster reported Wednesday.

The report did not identify the two or say where they were held or why. A Foreign Ministry spokesperson told the news channel that the ministry was aware of the situation and dealing with it, offering no further details.

Kan noted the arrests come a month after Turkey’s Sabah daily reported that 15 men who allegedly spied for Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency were arrested by authorities.

Sabah, which is close to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also carried an interview with one of the detainees, whom it identified only by his initials M.A.S, who described how he was unwittingly recruited.

It also published photos of the 15 men.

The photos appear to be mugshots of the men taken by Turkish authorities and are accompanied by initials claiming to represent their names. No further details were reported by the paper.

There has been no official confirmation from Turkey on the arrests.

The chairman of the powerful Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee has said none of the men were Mossad agents.

MK Ram Ben-Barak, a former deputy director of the Mossad intelligence agency, also suggested the Turkish government is eager to show its intelligence “achievements,” resulting in the occasional publication of false information.

“None of the published names were [of] Israeli spies and therefore, it should be put in proportion,” he told Channel 12.

According to Sabah, the arrests took place on October 7, following a year-long National Intelligence Organization (MIT) operation involving some 200 Turkish intelligence officers who tracked down the alleged spies.

The suspects, said to be of Arab descent, operated in groups of three, the report said. Some had met with Mossad agents in Croatia and Switzerland, where information was exchanged. They had also received orders in the Romanian capital of Bucharest and Kenya’s Nairobi. The five groups had operated in different areas of the country, Sabah reported.

The main targets of the espionage operation were Palestinians in Turkey and facilities that hosted them, Sabah claimed.

A report last year claimed the Palestinian terror group Hamas was secretly operating a facility in Turkey where it conducted cyberattacks and counterintelligence operations against Israel.

The headquarters, which is separate from Hamas’s official offices in the city, was set up without the knowledge of Turkish authorities, the report said.

The British daily The Telegraph also reported in 2020 that Turkey was granting citizenship to a dozen high-ranking Hamas members involved in coordinating terror attacks. The report was later confirmed by the chargé d’affaires at Israel’s embassy in Ankara.

Turkey sees Hamas as a legitimate political movement. The country has long maintained warm ties with Hamas, which have grown more overt as relations with Israel have chilled over the last decade. Israel has complained to Ankara about its ties to Hamas, but to no avail, according to the report.

In August 2020, Erdogan met with a Hamas delegation that included politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh and the terror group’s No. 2, Saleh al-Arouri — a top military commander who has a $5 million US bounty on his head.

The meeting was harshly condemned by the US State Department at the time, but the Turkish foreign ministry rejected the criticism, accusing Washington of “serving Israel’s interests.”

Hamas and Erdogan’s AKP party are linked politically. Both have close ideological ties to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movement.