President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Friday said that Turkey will never allow occupation of Golan Heights to be legitimized.
“U.S. President’s ‘unfortunate’ remarks on Golan Heights has brought the region to the brink of a new crisis,” Erdoğan said in a speech during the meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
Trump said in tweet on Thursday that it was time for the U.S. to recognize Israel’s control of the occupied Golan Heights.
Congressional momentum has been building on Capitol Hill for the change, and the State Department last week changed its terminology for the first time on the contested territory, referring to it as “Israeli-controlled” instead of its previous usage of “Israeli-occupied.”
Israel has long pushed Washington to recognize its claim over the territory it seized from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Israel occupies roughly two-thirds of the wider Golan Heights as a de facto result of the conflict. It moved to formally annex the territory in 1981 — an action unanimously rejected at the time by the UN Security Council.
