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Israel-Palestine-Jordan | ||
Turk demands for meeting not acceptable: Peres | ||
2010-09-22 | ||
UNITED NATIONS — A planned meeting between Israeli President Shimon Peres and his Turkish counterpart was scrapped because of the Israeli leader’s refusal to apologize for the deadly commando raid on a Turkish-led flotilla that tried to breach Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, Israeli officials said on Monday.
Gul on Monday denied that any such meeting had ever been planned. “That is not true,” the Turkish president said. “There was never a meeting scheduled between us.”
Peres told reporters that he found Turkey’s conditions for a meeting with Gul to be unacceptable. “I got some conditions which made this meeting in my judgment not a positive one,” Peres told reporters as the UN General Assembly’s Millennium Development Goals summit was getting under way. “Now we didn’t change our attitude to Turkey. We were friends, we remain friends. Maybe Turkey changed her mind, and that’s for the Turks to decide,” Peres said. “We don’t intend to worsen the situation. Neither can we submit to preconditions which are totally unacceptable.” Peres did not elaborate on the preconditions. But senior Israeli officials confirmed that Gul wanted Israel to publicly apologize for the flotilla raid. “The Turks came with the demands that could not be met ...,” said Israel’s UN Ambassador Meron Reuben. The demands included “that we apologize for the flotilla incident,” he said. | ||
Posted by:Steve White |