ISTANBUL: Turkiye slammed Israeli claims Ankara was arming and funding Palestinian group Hamas as "lies", accusing Israel of trying to direct attention away from the war in Gaza.

The angry rebuttal came after Israel's Foreign Minister Katz accused President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of "supplying arms and money to Hamas to kill Israelis."

In a post on X in Turkish, Katz claimed that the Israeli security services had dismantled "cells" that were "under directions from Hamas headquarters in Turkiye."

In response, Turkiye's Foreign Ministry said that Israel's top diplomat was "trying to conceal the crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians behind a series of lies, slander and disrespect."

"But Israel's dirty propaganda and psychological pressure aimed at our country and our president will remain ineffective," the ministry's statement added.

Israel's offensive against Hamas has killed at least 38,983 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry.

Ankara has been a fervent critic of Israel's conduct of the war, which was sparked by a bloody Hamas assault on October 7, with Erdogan repeatedly trading barbs with Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu.

Dubbing him the "butcher of Gaza", Erdogan has accused Netanyahu of seeking to "spread the war" across the wider Middle East, a point repeated in the foreign ministry's statement.

It accused "the members of Netanyahu's government" of "wanting to provoke a regional war to stay in power", calling for them to be tried in international courts.

"Turkiye will continue to defend the right of the Palestinian people to live in justice and peace," the foreign ministry added.

 -AFP