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The crisis in the relations between Turkey and Israel is fanning up

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated about frozen Israeli military purchases

MOSCOW, September 8 (Itar-Tass) —— Just a few days after the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from Turkey the crisis in the relations between the countries is escalating. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated about frozen Israeli military purchases and pledged that Turkish warships will appear more frequently in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea and this fact is even fraught with a direct military confrontation between two Middle Eastern influential countries in the future, Nezavisimaya Gazeta believes.

The newspaper recalls that the military trade is not the only source of tensions. Despite the tensions the bilateral trade reached 3.5 billion dollars in 2010 and this year the trade did not go down, but even grew 25% for the first six months.

High tensions in the relations was Israel’s unwillingness to apologize for the death of eight Turkish citizens in an Israeli naval operation to intercept the humanitarian convoy en route to the Gaza Strip in May 2010.

Novye Izvestia commented on a sensational news report, which the Israeli newspaper Haaretz made public. The newspaper reported that Tayyip Erdogan initiated to conclude a Turkish-Egyptian military union. Israel is the only country, against which the military alliance of the countries can be targeted. If the news report is true an unprecedented situation in the world history will emerge, when the Israeli armed forces will be recognized a probable rival of the NATO state, the newspaper noted.

Turkish officials did not confirm the Israeli news report. They are speaking only about an economic rather than a military union. However, amid deteriorating Turkish-Israeli relations the supposition that Turkish and Egyptian armed forces will ally against Israel does not look quite unlikely. “Those times, when Israel and Turkey were rallied with the common pro-US policy, passed away. Erdogan’s government intended to seek for Palestine’s membership in the UN, but it intends to be more oriented at the Islamic world. Naturally, in these conditions harmonic relations with Israel can hardly be expected,” a senior scientific expert of the MGIMO Euro-Atlantic Security Centre Yulia Kudryashova told Novye Izvestia. Meanwhile, the expert believes that a military union with Egypt would be an extremely radical step for Erdogan.