President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and First Lady Emine Erdoğan attended the International Mount of Olives Peace Awards. 

Making a speech at the event, President Erdoğan saluted the Palestinians, who have been oppressed and displaced from their homes for years, and underlined that Turkiye will continue to stand by its Palestinian brothers and sisters.

"Palestinians symbolize all the oppressed in the world"

"The Palestinian and Al Quds issue is not solely the cause of a single nation, a geography or a city. Because of the oppression, massacres, and injustices they endure, the Palestinians symbolize all the oppressed in the world," said President Erdoğan.

"Al Quds, which has been the sacred city of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims throughout the history, symbolizes the ideal of gathering around the shared values of humanity," he underlined and, describing the incidents in Palestine and Al Quds as noting but attempts by oppressors to legitimize and even institutionalize their oppression, stated: "The violence the Israeli administration has recently inflicted upon the Palestinians, whose only guilt is to defend their own lands, shows the increasingly growing impudence of the oppressors. The international community's indifference to the sufferings of the Palestinians, scores of whom have died a martyr's death and thousands of whom have got wounded as a result of these attacks, indicates a future where no community or no individual will be safe."

"The UN must absolutely be reformed"

Emphasizing that besides the incidents in Palestine, what is going on in Syria also points to a painful reality, President Erdoğan underscored that it is not any longer possible to conceive or tolerate the hypocrisy of the international community, particularly that of the international organizations whose duty is to ensure peace.

Noting that they express their objection to this distorted situation with the motto that 'the world is bigger than five,' President Erdoğan said: "There is no sustainability in a system which abandons all the countries' security to the interests and mercy of just five countries. The UN must absolutely be reformed. As Turkiye, we have taken action to pave the way for the correction of this distorted situation. We have been telling this to all the leaders we come together with across the world. We will maintain this struggle of ours until the establishment of an international security structure which would serve the whole humanity." (ILKHA)