In yet another verbal tirade against Israeli, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday accused the Jewish state of “deliberately killing Palestinian mothers”, Reuters reported.
Addressing hundreds of thousands of supporters at his biggest rally so far ahead of the August 10 election, Erdogan again likened Israel's actions to those of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
"Just like Hitler, who sought to establish a race free of all faults, Israel is chasing after the same target," Erdogan told the sea of cheering supporters at an Istanbul arena, according to Reuters.
"They kill women so that they will not give birth to Palestinians; they kill babies so that they won't grow up; they kill men so they can't defend their country ... They will drown in the blood they shed," he charged.
The relations between Turkey and Israel are already strained ever since the Marmara incident in 2010, but the Turkish Prime Minister has upped the rhetoric against Israel since it launched the self-defense Operation Protective Edge in Gaza.
Erdogan has become increasingly vocal over the operation, and threatened to end the normalization process with Israel over "state terrorism."
He has also accused Israel of "lies" because "not enough" Israeli Jews have died in the conflict and has compared Jewish Home MK Ayelet Shaked to Adolf Hitler.
Erdogan's comments on Sunday drew a sharp rebuke from a Jewish leader in the United States, who called the Turkish prime minister "the Joseph Goebbels of our time," referring to Hitler's chief propagandist.
"The time has come for world leaders to say that he has now crossed a line, and has crossed a line into the area of anti-Semitism and the world won't tolerate it," Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, told Reuters.
The American Jewish Congress has asked Erdogan to return an award it gave him in 2004 due to his criticism of Israel. The Turkish leader responded by saying he would be “glad” to return the award.