Türkiye Flotilla Challenges Gaza Blockade, AK Party Pushes Constitution

Fifty-four boats and activists from 70 countries left the southwestern port of Marmaris on Thursday under the Global Sumud Flotilla banner, mounting a second attempt to break Israel's blockade of Gaza two weeks after Israeli forces stopped the convoy in international waters off the Greek coast. Among the Turkish participants are Sümeyra Akdeniz Ordu, a board member of the flotilla, and Mahmut Arslan, head of the Confederation of Turkish Real Trade Unions (Hak-İş). The first leg had launched from Spain on April 12; on April 30 Israeli forces intercepted the ships, released most of the activists onto the Greek island of Crete, and took two — Saif Abu Keshek, a Spanish national of Palestinian origin, and Brazilian activist Thiago Avila — to Israel for questioning, deporting the pair the following Sunday. At a Wednesday news conference in Marmaris, Abu Keshek vowed "more than 500 brave people" would now resume the mission and accused Israel of conducting a "slow genocide" through the blockade, citing what he called a "colonising process to displace Palestinians". The relaunch follows a September 2025 attempt by the same group that ended in another Israeli interception with hundreds of activists detained; Israel has maintained the Gaza blockade since 2007 and, per the Daily Sabah account of Thursday's departure, the war that began in October 2023 has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians and destroyed about 90 percent of the Strip's infrastructure, with the United Nations putting reconstruction costs at roughly $70 billion.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan worked the other end of the regional map. Visiting Astana for the informal summit of the Organization of Turkic States, he published an article in Kazakhstan's Kazinform news agency arguing that the Turkic world has an "increasingly important" role in promoting peace and stability across Eurasia, that existing global governance mechanisms had failed, and that a fairer international system was overdue. The piece highlighted deepening Türkiye-Kazakhstan bilateral trade and treated the OTS as a parallel diplomatic arena to the NATO/Russia axis. In a separate Foreign Ministry statement, Ankara condemned a raid on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem led by Israeli Minister of Negev and Galilee Affairs Yitzhak Wasserlauf, calling the visit a violation of the site's historical and legal status as a Muslim holy place; the raid landed two days before Israel marks the anniversary of its 1967 occupation of East Jerusalem.

The domestic political track moved quietly forward. Hayati Yazıcı, a senior AK Party official, said in Ankara that work continued on drafting a new civilian constitution to replace the 1982 military-era charter, arguing the existing text "no longer reflects" Türkiye's evolving political and social realities. Yazıcı's remarks followed Erdoğan's renewed call last week for a "new, inclusive, libertarian and civilian" replacement and form part of a longer-running AK Party push that opposition parties view as a vehicle for entrenching presidential authority.

The macro backdrop continues to constrain that project. The Turkish lira weakened to about 45.43 per US dollar on Thursday, down 1.56 percent in the past month and 17.50 percent over the past year and trading at fresh record lows extended through May despite ongoing central-bank foreign-exchange interventions. April consumer prices rose 4.18 percent month-on-month, pushing annual headline inflation to 32.37 percent, a six-month high and above the 31 percent market expectation, with the Iran war's energy spike adding to underlying pressure. Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek's April 27 incentive package — a 100 percent tax exemption on service exports and a 9 percent corporate tax rate for manufacturing exporters — is the centrepiece of an effort to position Istanbul as a regional financial hub for capital displaced by the war in the Gulf.

Foreign-policy plumbing continues alongside. A preview meeting co-hosted by the British, French and German embassies in Ankara on May 12 confirmed that the 2026 NATO Summit will be held in the capital on July 7-8. The agenda is expected to centre on alliance solidarity — tested by the Iran missile barrage on Israel in which NATO air-defence systems intercepted four incoming Iranian missiles — alongside defence-industrial cooperation, Middle East policy and Black Sea security.