Ankara, January 18: The scriptwriter of a Turkish television series that sparked a diplomatic row with Israel said his team is working on a movie to show more alleged Israeli “crimes against humanity”, in remarks published Saturday.
The movie, to be released in the second half of this year, will focus on Palestinian suffering in the Gaza Strip and “depict Israel as it is — with bloody hands, merciless… flouting all human values,” Bahadir Ozdener told the Vatan newspaper.
“What we do is fiction… But what about what they do, their crimes against humanity? They are real,” he claimed.
Ozdener is the scriptwriter of “Valley of the Wolves”, a long-running television series about the adventures of a Turkish secret agent which took Turkish viewers by storm.
In the episode that angered Israel, the protagonist storms an Israeli diplomatic mission to rescue a Turkish boy kidnapped by the intelligence agency Mossad.
Israel slammed the show for depicting Israelis “as baby-snatchers and war criminals,” but Ozdener expressed no remorse.
“It is Israel who must show remorse…. If they cannot see themselves in the mirror, we know how to hold the mirror to their face,” he said.
The once-flourishing Turkish-Israeli ties took a sharp downturn last year when Israel’s devastating war on Gaza prompted an unprecedented barrage of criticism from the government in Ankara.
—Agencies