Transparency & Accountability
Turkey asks Interpol to arrest Netanyahu over the Gaza flotilla raid
Image credit: Benjamin Netanyahu — Wikimedia Commons · License
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Turkey said on Friday that it is asking Interpol to circulate a red notice for the arrest of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over the Israeli navy's seizure of the Global Sumud Flotilla, turning a domestic criminal file into a request aimed at every police force in the organisation's membership.
The step follows arrest warrants issued by an Istanbul court on 14 July, and a formal request from Turkey's justice ministry to the interior ministry to carry the warrants to Interpol. The ministry listed the accusations as crimes against humanity and genocide, along with aggravated deprivation of liberty, intentional injury, torture, damage to property, aggravated looting and the hijacking of transport vehicles.
The case concerns the flotilla of roughly fifty vessels and more than five hundred activists, Turkish citizens among them, that sailed for Gaza in October 2025 and was intercepted by Israeli forces before it reached the coast.
A red notice is a request to locate and provisionally arrest — not a warrant, and not a verdict.
Interpol's constitution bars it from acting on matters of a political, military, religious or racial character.
A red notice does not exist until Interpol issues it. The organisation's general secretariat reviews each request against its own rules, and the article that forbids intervention in political and military matters is the provision Israel is expected to invoke.
Netanyahu's office answers with Erdogan#
The Israeli prime minister's office said Israel has long ceased to be impressed by Turkish hypocrisy, called President Recep Tayyip Erdogan an antisemitic dictator, and said he massacred Kurds, supports Hamas and represses his own people.
The Israeli response arrived the same week that Israel struck a site in Syria and Ankara accused it of manufacturing an incident, and while eight Arab and Muslim states — Turkey among them — condemned the new Israeli tender for housing in E1 east of occupied Jerusalem.
For Palestinian readers the distinction between the courts matters more than the headline. The International Criminal Court's arrest warrant for Netanyahu, issued by its pre-trial chamber in November 2024, obliges the court's states parties to arrest him if he lands on their territory. The Turkish warrant is a national prosecution, and the red notice is a police instrument that asks other states to act on that national case.
Neither instrument has yet put anyone in a courtroom. What each one narrows is a map: the number of runways an Israeli government plane can use without a legal question waiting at the end of the flight.
