Erdogan vows to seek accountability for crimes in Gaza
At the opening of the general debate of the 81st UN General Assembly, on Sept. 22, 2026, the Turkish president put Gaza at the center of his speech, urging pressure on Israel and an end to impunity, with no new judicial measure announced.
At the podium of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UN), on Sept. 22, 2026, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made Gaza the center of his speech and pledged that Türkiye would keep carrying the Palestinians’ voice to the floor. President of the Palestinian Authority (PA) Mahmoud Abbas missed the gathering for the second consecutive year, after the United States denied visas to the Palestinian delegation.
Erdogan brought figures to the podium that he presented as the scale of the tragedy: more than 74,000 Palestinians killed in three years, most of them women and children, more than 70 percent of hospital generators in the enclave out of service for lack of fuel, and more than 1,500 killed even after the cease-fire reached through the efforts of U.S. President Donald Trump with contributions from Türkiye and other countries.
The speech’s vocabulary was Erdogan’s harshest yet at the UN on the subject. He described Gaza as the world’s largest graveyard for children and as the most inhumane and shameful concentration camp of our time, accused Israel of practicing state terror and of acting with a genocidal mentality with an insatiable appetite for killing.
The demand
The speech’s practical ask was pressure. Erdogan called on the assembled countries to exert greater pressure on Israel, restated Turkish support for the two-state solution, and said he hoped to see the day when an independent and territorially contiguous Palestinian state, based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, becomes reality. He also warned against attempts to dismantle the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and urged countries that have yet to recognize Palestine to reconsider.
The occupied West Bank and Jerusalem entered the speech as the second front of the same charge. Erdogan said the West Bank is going through its worst period of illegal Israeli settler violence and criticized the Israeli authorities for restricting Muslim and Christian access to holy sites in Jerusalem.
The system
Erdogan tied Gaza to UN reform. He renewed the call for the Security Council to be reformed, returning to the principle he has defended for years: the world is bigger than five. He defined the current arrangement as a system in which the will of more than 190 countries is subject to the whims of five and demanded the equal application of international law to powerful and weaker states, warning that a system in which impunity becomes the norm is destined to decay.
Impunity as the norm is the diagnosis, and Gaza is the case sustaining it at the podium.
The speech further cited more than 60 wars and conflicts over the past year and some 250,000 killed from Gaza to Ukraine, from Myanmar to Darfur, from Iran to Lebanon, to argue that the UN is decreasingly fulfilling its founding task of preserving international peace and security.
The speech sets down what accountability means to Ankara: collective pressure on Israel and an end to impunity as the system’s norm. Erdogan announced no new Turkish judicial measure at the International Criminal Court (ICC) or the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The pledge he recorded in New York is a political one, and its content fits entirely inside the line he repeated about the Council — the world is bigger than five.