Gaza blockade must end, says Davutoglu at UN meeting in Istanbul

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has said Israel should respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and end the blockade on Gaza. “Turkey does not want the current situation in Palestine that resembles a modern ghetto to continue and wants all practices that threaten humanitarian rights there to be stopped,” the top Turkish diplomat noted. “The blockade on Gaza must come to an end. This is and will be our policy,” he added. Davutoglu reiterated Turkey's solidarity with the Palestinian people and support for them to have a normal life on the land in which they are the indigenous inhabitants. He was speaking at a press conference following the first session of a two-day meeting of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People that started in İstanbul on Tuesday. Davutoglu said it was a significant development and also meaningful that the meeting had convened in Turkey. The committee was established in 1975 as a subsidiary body to the UN General Assembly with a mandate to promote the Palestinians’ national rights. Davutoglu stressed that the Palestinian issue has an internationally strategic dimension, but for Turkey, it is, above all, a humanitarian issue. “We want the children of Gaza and the West Bank, just like children in other parts of the world, to look to the future with hope. We want Palestinian people to be allowed to be connected with the outside world so that they can fulfill their needs,” he added. The Gaza Strip has been under a tightened Israeli and Egyptian economic blockade since 2007 when the Hamas movement took over the territory after being elected in the 2006 elections.