An opinion piece on Türkiye in the Israeli media:
The website is blocked in Türkiye so I'm sharing the article here.
Shay Gal - Israelhayom
Iran was the rehearsal. The Turkish file is open.
The Turkish file is already operational. It is architecture: Akkuyu, missiles, launch infrastructure, the Turkish occupied northern Cyprus, Somalia, Hamas sanctuary and funding, a defence industry, a leadership normalising escalation, a state aligning institutions and strategy. Components, not compartments. Integration is the risk.
Ankara's Foreign Ministry labelled Benjamin Netanyahu "the Hitler of our time" and vowed prosecution. Istanbul prosecutors indicted Netanyahu and 34 Israelis over the 2025 Global Sumud flotilla. Rhetoric and prosecution align. Not statements. Signals.
Erdogan's shift is operational. Denunciations gave way to Libya and Karabakh, followed by explicit intent: Turkey could "enter Israel" as it did there. Media normalised invasion, punishment and siege. His language is input.
Israeli planning follows execution logic. The same disciplines applied to nuclear infrastructure and terror command networks in the Iranian file have already been executed, including actions against Hamas operatives in Qatar in autumn 2025 and operations across multiple theatres. They are now applied to the Turkish one.
In Israeli planning, Erdogan's phrasing, precedents and timing are variables. The question is when he acts on them.
At Akkuyu, rhetoric meets vulnerability. Turkey's first nuclear plant, built, owned and operated by Russia's Rosatom on the Mediterranean coast, comes online late. Four VVER 1200 units, built for decades, supplying a tenth of Turkey's grid, lock Ankara into dependence on Russian technology, fuel and decommissioning. Erdogan's insistence on sovereign enrichment marks a shift from externally controlled infrastructure to national option space.
Israel demonstrated the model: programmes can be delayed, distorted and turned into liabilities long before a strike. Akkuyu fits that model. A reactor is defeated without being struck. It is delayed, driven into paralysis, constrained by export controls, burdened by sanctions and stranded politically until it becomes a prestige shell.
Three pressure layers. Regulatory pressure forces pauses, retrofits and oversight. Structural constraints, supply chains, services and financing remain exposed to sanctions or export controls. Alliance pressure raises cost directly. No veto. Only increasing difficulty sustaining expansion under scrutiny.
A nuclear plant is not a casual target. International humanitarian law sets a high bar where civilian harm risks escalation absent direct military use, but militarisation voids that insulation. The law defines cumulative triggers: shielding operational military assets, direct participation in attacks causing damage, and failure of non-kinetic measures. Once crossed, neutralisation begins with disablement of function, flow and integration.
Stuxnet, followed by Flame and Duqu, showed that nuclear infrastructure can be degraded at system level without airstrikes, through covert cyber operations and systemic disruption already applied in the Iranian file. The same tools. The same maps.
As Ankara approaches fuel cycle autonomy and extends military use along its coastline, the margin narrows. Akkuyu is mapped as a system no less precisely than by Ankara and Rosatom.
Akkuyu does not fall within the logic of Article 5. It is not a collective defence asset. It is a structural vulnerability embedded within alliance space. If its function shifts from civilian generation to operational enablement, action against it is assessed not as aggression but as response. Article 5 requires consensus. Where a facility contributes to threat architecture rather than alliance defence, that consensus does not form. From exposure to reach.
Erdogan has already defined the vector. After
