Erdoğan stood next to Pakistan's prime minister in Istanbul on Saturday and aimed a warning at Israel: do not blow up the one deal keeping the region from another war.
"We are closely following the Israeli administration's attempts to dynamite the deal," he said at a joint news conference with Shehbaz Sharif, referring to the interim agreement between the United States and Iran. "The current war-addicted Israeli government must not be allowed to drown our geography in the smell of gunpowder and blood again."
The agreement he was defending is the one Ankara calls the Islamabad Memorandum, an understanding between Washington and Tehran that Qatar and Pakistan brokered after the two traded fire earlier this year. Al Jazeera reported that it set a 60-day ceasefire, reopened the Strait of Hormuz, and laid out terms on Iran's nuclear program with a timeline for a permanent deal.
Erdoğan gave Pakistan the credit. "The whole world breathed a sigh of relief thanks to the calm ensured by the Islamabad Memorandum," he said, congratulating Sharif and his country for their part in reaching it. Türkiye, he added, has backed "every step that will contribute to reducing tensions in our region and resolving problems through diplomacy."
He accused Israel of working to unravel that calm. Türkiye is watching Israeli efforts to sabotage the agreement, Erdoğan said, while Israeli forces keep striking Lebanon and Syria and press what he called "unlawful and inhumane" attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Türkiye and a number of other governments describe Israel's war on Gaza as a genocide, and Israel faces a case over it at the International Court of Justice.
The truce is not holding cleanly. Al Jazeera reported that the United States and Iran launched tit-for-tat strikes last week as each side argued over what the agreement meant, and that Iran's deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, said Tehran would open a channel with Washington to report breaches.
Erdoğan's message came three days before he hosts NATO's leaders in Ankara, where he is expected to press the same case. The press conference closed a day of Türkiye-Pakistan summitry that also set a target of raising bilateral trade to $5 billion.
The line Erdoğan keeps drawing is a plain one. A settlement made without the region's weight behind it will not last, he says, and a war restarted by Israel would not stay inside anyone's borders.
Update, 8 July 2026: The memorandum Erdoğan defended has since collapsed. On 7 and 8 July, as Türkiye hosted the NATO summit, the United States and Iran traded strikes across the Gulf and Trump declared the ceasefire over. See US and Iran trade strikes as Trump declares the ceasefire over.