Israel marks Turkey as 'unsafe' after bombing deaths

Jerusalem, Mar 21: Israel has raised the alert level on Turkey declaring the country as "unsafe" for its citizens after three Israelis were killed and 11 others wounded in a suicide bombing in Istanbul.

The Prime Minister's Office in a statement said it has decided to "upgrade existing travel warning and recommend that the public avoid visiting Turkey".

Amid a spate of attacks by the Islamic State groups and Kurdish separatists, and especially Saturday's bombing, "it was decided to update the existing travel warning vis-a-vis Turkey from an ongoing potential threat to a basic concrete threat," the statement said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his reaction said Israel was at the front line of a global war on terror, adding that those who failed to condemn terrorist attacks were in effect supporting them. "There could be no justification for terrorism.

Israel is at the forefront of the fight against international terrorism. This fight is primarily military, but no less than that, it is moral," the Israeli premier said at the beginning of the weekly cabinet meeting yesterday.

"The key point of the moral struggle against terrorism is clear — terrorism, the murder of innocent people, has no justification anywhere – not in Istanbul, not in the Ivory Coast and not in Jerusalem.

"Those who do not condemn terrorism support terrorism," he emphasised. The bodies of the three Israelis killed in Saturday's bombing in Istanbul, along with several wounded, arrived in Israel on an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) airplane.

The Israeli victims of the terror attack were Yonathan Suher, 40, Simha Dimri, 60, and Avraham Goldman, 69. Suher and Goldman were also named as US citizens by the State Department.

Turkey named the alleged perpetrator of the attack as Mehmet Öztürk, a suspected Islamic State member.

PTI