Turkey blocks Israeli bid to open office at NATO headquarters

PanARMENIAN.Net - Turkey has blocked an Israeli move to open a representation office at NATO headquarters, its Foreign Minister said Sunday, September 18, adding that data collected by a radar system in eastern Turkey would not be shared with Israel.

“Israel recently made an attempt to open an office at NATO [headquarters] in Brussels. We said we would veto this attempt and the issue was not even put on the agenda,” Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said in an interview with the CNNTürk news channel.

A Foreign Ministry official told the Hürriyet Daily News that Israel made the request under NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue program, launched in 1994 with seven Mediterranean countries.

Davutoğlu insisted that information gathered by a U.S.-led radar system, to be stationed in Turkey’s Malatya province as part of a NATO missile-shield project, would be available for use only by alliance members, denying suggestions that intelligence would be shared with Israel.

“We will provide support only for systems that belong to NATO and are used solely by members of NATO,” he said.

The minister dismissed as “manipulation” a newspaper report that quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying that data collected by the radar would be used to help defend Israel, stressing that Washington had assured Ankara that no such official existed.

According to a Wall Street Journal report Friday, U.S. officials said they planned to fuse data from radars in Turkey, Israel and other sites to create a comprehensive picture of the missile threat to the region. Turkey, for its part, could also benefit from real-time data from radar the United States already operates in Israel, the report said.