A delegation from Turkey will meet with representatives of the Israeli Delek Group and Texas-based Noble Energy in Jerusalem on Sunday to discuss a plan to lay an underwater gas pipeline between Israel and Turkey.
Delek Group and Noble Energy are the two main partners in the consortium that has developed most of Israel’s major natural gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea.
The Turkish delegation will follow the Jerusalem meeting with a visit to Gaza to meet with the region’s ruling Hamas terrorist government over its recent energy crisis.
This past Wednesday, Israel sent a delegation to Turkey’s capital city of Ankara in a similar visit to launch the first formal meeting between top officials of both governments in the past seven years. Following that meeting, the two sides announced that Turkey would send two ministers to Israel in the near future to further tighten bilateral cooperation.
Turkey and Israel, formerly close allies, reconciled last year and restored ambassadorial-level diplomatic ties, mending a deep rift caused by the deaths of 10 armed Turkish “activists” in clashes on the Mavi Marmara flotilla vessel that tried to breach Israel’s maritime blockade on Gaza in 2010.
The aim of the three-day visit was to “continue developing bilateral ties and strengthen cooperation on the political, economic and cultural spheres,” an Israeli Foreign Ministry statement explained last month.
“The political dialogue sends a positive message on the commitment of both sides to deepen the relationship between the two countries,” read the statement, adding that the talks also allowed for “comprehensive discussion, after six years of … challenges, on the drastic changes in the region.”
Issues on the agenda between the two countries were evaluated during the talks, especially opportunities for cooperation in the fields of energy, the economy, culture and tourism, a Foreign Ministry official told the Turkish Hurriyet Daily News.
On Monday, Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Nabi Avci, will visit Israel on a state visit while the energy delegation is in Gaza.
Gaza has suffered major power outages for months, and recently the problem has escalated as Hamas continues to choose to invest its resources in building terrorist tunnels and military infrastructure, rather than the residential and community requirements of its civilian population.