President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hosted Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam in İstanbul on 10 July, using a working dinner at the Vahdettin Mansion to press Ankara's case as a partner to Beirut while Israeli forces went on striking Lebanon's south.
Erdoğan welcomed Salam with an official ceremony, then walked him to a pavilion window and pointed out the city's landmarks before the two sat down to talk. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan joined the meeting. The Turkish leader called Lebanon a "brotherly country" and said Ankara would keep up its diplomatic efforts to help secure it. "We will continue to provide every possible support, including humanitarian assistance, to help establish security, peace, and stability in Lebanon," Erdoğan said, according to the Communications Directorate. He argued that closer diplomatic contact between the two capitals would pay off, and that Lebanon and Syria would both gain from good-neighborly relations. Ahead of the visit, Communications Director Burhanettin Duran said the talks would reaffirm Türkiye's backing for Lebanon's territorial integrity and sovereignty.
The visit carried a personal note. Erdoğan gave Salam the Turkish edition of the memoirs of the prime minister's grandfather, Selim Ali Selam, a founder of the Beirut reform movement who sat in the Ottoman parliament as a deputy for Beirut and later served as the city's mayor. Salam shared a photograph of the moment on Instagram and said he was touched by the gesture.
The diplomacy unfolded against a war that a ceasefire has not stopped. Since Israel opened its offensive on 2 March, Lebanon's Health Ministry counts 4,324 people killed and 12,221 wounded, with more than a million displaced by the government's own tally. The killing has not paused for the paperwork. On 14 July, an Israeli drone struck Nabatieh al-Fawqa and wounded two people, and Israeli troops set homes ablaze in East Zawtar, Lebanon's National News Agency reported. It was the same pattern Israeli warplanes had followed a week earlier, days before negotiators were due to meet.
Beirut and Israel signed a US-sponsored framework on 26 June, a document Salam has been careful to call a guide for negotiations rather than a treaty. It sets no firm timetable for an Israeli withdrawal and ties the process to a Lebanese army deployment and the disarmament of groups outside state control, chief among them Hezbollah. Lebanese and Israeli officials opened two days of talks in Rome on 14 July, hosted at the US embassy, with President Joseph Aoun instructing his delegation to demand an immediate pullback from two southern zones before anything else. Israel's military, which is occupying a strip it describes as a buffer zone about 10 kilometers (6 miles) inside the border, says its troops will stay until Hezbollah is disarmed.
For Ankara, the meeting fit a widening reach into the eastern Mediterranean. Erdoğan has named Israel's strikes on Lebanon and Syria alongside its war on Gaza, and Türkiye is positioning itself as a steady hand for a Lebanese state trying to reclaim its own south. Aoun travels to Washington on 21 July, where he says he will press President Donald Trump to hold Israel to the deal.