Last summer, Turkey and Israel, at American urging, concluded a reconciliation agreement that ended over six years of hostility between the former allies. Pursuant to that agreement, Ankara pledged to end its support for Hamas and expelled Saleh al-Arouri, the country’s most senior Hamas official. Yoav Zitun notes that President Erdogan has nevertheless not lived up to his end of the bargain:
Hamas’s main activity in Turkey is coordinating terror cells in the West Bank. . . . Arouri’s successors are [also] recruiting Palestinian students to study in Muslim countries in general and Turkey in particular. The students are then sent for military training to Lebanon or Syria and from there return to the West Bank to carry out attacks against Israel.
For example, two months ago, the IDF and Shin Bet, [Israel’s internal security service], detained a Palestinian who had been living in Turkish Cyprus for several years. In August 2015, [he] was recruited in Jordan by Hamas [and] given military training and explosives expertise. During a meeting with Hamas operatives in Istanbul last January, he was instructed to recruit terrorists in the West Bank using encrypted memory cards.
Another highly publicized case concerns Muhammad Murtaja, who was head of a humanitarian aid organization in Gaza run by the Turkish government. According to the Shin Bet, following his arrest Murtaja was accused of transferring to Hamas operatives millions of dollars that were donated by Ankara.
Read more on Ynet: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4959601,00.html