Turkey’s Erdogan visits Egypt as ties are back in full swing after a decade of tensions

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held talks in Cairo on Wednesday with his Egyptian counterpart in efforts to rally support for growing demands in the region that Israel halt its war on Gaza.

Erdogan's visit comes as ties between Ankara and Cairo are back on track after years of tensions and frosty relations.

Turkey has long been a backer of the pan-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood group , which Egypt outlawed as a terror group after the country's military coup in 2013.

The Turkish leader arrived in the Egyptian capital after visiting on Tuesday the United Arab Emirates, where he met with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Erdogan met with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at Cairo’s Ittihadiya palace, according to Egypt’s state-run media.

Their talks focused on bilateral relations and regional challenges, especially efforts to stop the war in Gaza, Sisi later said at a joint news conference.

"We agreed on the need for an immediate ceasefire (in Gaza) and the need to achieve calm in the West Bank" to relaunch Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the Egyptian president said.

In a joint news conference after talks with Sisi, Erdogan said that Turkey was ready for cooperation with Egypt to rebuild Gaza and vowing to boost trade with Egypt to $15 billion in the short term.

At first, Israel's disturbing paradoxical behaviour may be hard for some to wrap their head around. But for those intimately familiar with the culture of Zionism, and how it has effectively managed to enjoy an exceptional amount of impunity, it makes sense. @ASE explains more: pic.twitter.com/vXp4GGPgVs

— The New Arab (@The_NewArab) February 12, 2024

 Erdogan added that the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza topped the agenda of their talks and the two countries were evaluating energy and defence cooperation.

Erdogan's visit to Cairo is his first in over a decade.

Egypt and Turkey fell out after the Egyptian military in 2013 ousted President Mohammed Morsi, who hailed from the Muslim Brotherhood, amid mass protest against his divisive one year of rule.

Ankara abandoned its criticism of Sisi's government over the past years as it tried to repair frayed ties with Egypt and other Arab heavyweights.

In November 2022, Erdogan and Sisi were photographed shaking hands during the World Cup in Qatar.

The war in Gaza has reached a critical point, with an impeding Israeli offensive on the city of Rafah , along the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt, where some 1.4 million people — over half the territory’s population — are crammed into tent camps and overflowing apartments and shelters.

Egypt is concerned that a ground assault on Rafah would push hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians across the border and into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.

It has threatened to suspend the country's decades-old peace treaty with Israel.

Egypt, together with Qatar and the United States, a key Israel ally, has been working to try and broker a ceasefire and the return of the remaining 130 hostages held by Hamas, around a fourth of whom are believed to be dead. 

The negotiators held talks in Cairo on Tuesday but there were no signs of a breakthrough.

Hamas’ assault into Israel on October 7 led to the killing of about 1,200 people and abducted around 250, according to Israeli figures.

The overall Palestinian death toll in Gaza has now surpassed 28,000 people, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza and a quarter of the territory's residents are starving.

"Before the region is exposed to harsher threats, we need to stop the massacre in Gaza now," Erdogan said at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Tuesday.