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Two meetings, held almost simultaneously towards the end of December, offered a stark illustration of the competing strategic visions now shaping the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant.

In Damascus, Turkiye’s foreign, defence and intelligence chiefs met Syrian officials on December 22 as Ankara continued to prioritise the consolidation of state authority and stabilisation after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria.

On the same day, Israel hosted Greece and Cyprus for the latest iteration of their trilateral framework. Two days before that meeting, Israel launched another air attack on Syria – one of more than 600 strikes in 2025 – a reminder to Ankara and Damascus that Israel is willing to disrupt Syria’s recovery from war.

While officially framed around energy cooperation and regional connectivity, the trilateral agenda between Israel, Greece and Cyprus has steadily expanded to encompass security coordination and military alignment, signalling a shift from economic competition to strategic containment.

For Cem Gurdeniz, a retired admiral and one of the architects of Turkiye’s “Blue Homeland” maritime doctrine that calls for Ankara to safeguard its interests across the surrounding seas – the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea – the meeting was an attempt “to exclude and encircle Turkiye”.

Gurdeniz describes Israel’s approach as an indirect containment strategy aimed not at confrontation but at altering Ankara’s behaviour. “The objective is not war, but behavioural change – narrowing Turkiye’s strategic space to induce withdrawal without conflict,” he told Al Jazeera, warning against treating the standoff as routine energy competition.

For Israel, the trilateral framework reflects unease with Turkiye’s approach in Syria, which prioritises territorial integrity and the restoration of central authority – an outcome that runs counter to Israel’s preference for a fragmented regional security landscape.

Greece and Cyprus, meanwhile, view the partnership as a means to advance maritime boundary claims and energy corridors that would marginalise Turkiye’s role in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Security and military cooperation now form a central pillar of the trilateral agenda, according to Muzaffer Senel, a visiting scholar of European studies at Marmara University.

“All three actors have sought to create faits accomplis through unilateral initiatives in the region in what they jointly perceive as a common rival: Turkiye,” Senel told Al Jazeera in reference to possible security and energy arrangements between the three countries that could threaten Ankara’s interests.

Israel’s gambit

The decision to hold the trilateral meeting in Israel was not incidental. It reflected the shrinking diplomatic space available to the Israeli leadership as the genocidal war on Gaza deepens Israel’s international isolation.

With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity, his ability to travel abroad has become increasingly constrained, particularly to countries that are signatories to the court, such as Greece and Cyprus.

The Greek government, while not rejecting the ICC’s warrant for Netanyahu – which also includes one for Israel’s former defence minister, Yoav Gallant – has said that “these decisions do not help”. Cyprus has also noted that the ICC warrants are binding. Neither has publicly said that they will not execute the warrants.

Hosting the Greek and Cypriot leaders in Israel was therefore not simply a logistical choice, but a symptom of how legal and diplomatic pressures are reshaping Israel’s outlook and pushing it towards security-centric alliances.

At the same time, the meeting served to recast Turkiye as a regional problem through coded Ottoman references and narratives of expansionist ambition, aimed at eroding Ankara’s interests in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Standing alongside Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides, Netanyahu – a longtime advocate of a Greater Israel – warned that “those who fantasise they can re-establish their empires and their dominion over our lands” should “forget it”, a remark widely interpreted as a reference to Turkiye.

As a peninsular state, Turkiye has more than 8,300km (5,100 miles) of coastline. Greece argues its Aegean islands, many of which lie just off the Turkish coast, generate their own exclusive economic zones (EEZ), extending maritime claims up to 200 nautical miles (about 370km).

Ankara rejects this, saying islands cannot create full EEZs and that borders should be drawn from the mainland.

Cyprus is another flashpoint. After a Greek Cypriot coup in 1974, Turkiye intervened as a guarantor power, splitting the island. Turkiye is the only country to recognise the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. In 2004, the north backed a United Nations reunification plan, but the Greek-administered south rejected it, leaving the conflict unresolved.

In the Eastern Mediterranean, these regional wedge issues have given Israel an opportunity to insert itself and further inflame tensions.

Greece, in particular, has sought to leverage Israel’s close ties with Washington to secure diplomatic backing in longstanding maritime boundary disputes.

“Greece seeks to involve the US through Israel in order to gain diplomatic backing for resolving Eastern Mediterranean maritime boundary issues,” said Senel. Those disputes – involving gas exploration rights also claimed by Turkiye – have long fuelled regional tensions and now form part of a broader effort to constrain Ankara’s strategic room for manoeuvre.

While no formal collective defence agreement has been signed, high-level cooperation among the three states is moving beyond ad hoc coordination towards a more institutionalised security framework. The inclusion of the United States as a “like-minded partner” under a so-called 3+1 format, Senel noted, “clearly conveys a strategic message directed at Turkiye”.

Although the trilateral mechanism stops short of a formal military alliance, its trajectory points towards deeper security and defence cooperation, reinforcing Ankara’s perception of an emerging containment axis in the eastern Mediterranean.

Emerging anti-Turkiye axis

Relations between Greece, Cyprus and Israel have not been hindered by Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which began in October 2023.

Unlike several other European Union states that have described Israel’s campaign in Gaza as genocide or ethnic cleansing and called for sanctions over violations of international law, Greece and Cyprus have remained largely silent while expanding cooperation with Israel.

“In the current context, where the Greek Cypriots will assume the presidency of the Council of the EU, and at a time when the EU is ignoring Turkiye’s geostrategic position and importance, finding diplomatic pathways to alleviate the tensions is a hard task,” said Zeynep Alemdar, foreign policy programme director at the Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul.

“EU officials do not understand the mutual benefits of including Turkiye in the energy and defence calculations of the region,” Alemdar told Al Jazeera.

In December, Greek parliamentarians approved the purchase of 36 PULS rocket artillery systems from Israel for approximately $760m.

The two countries are also advancing towards a major defence agreement estimated at $3.5bn, under which Israeli defence firms would construct a multi-layered air defence system for Greece.

In September 2025, Cyprus also received an Israeli-made air defence system costing tens of millions of dollars, with further deliveries expected.

“Turkiye will surely try to dilute this coalition through diplomacy with its Middle Eastern allies, yet Israel’s disruption will continue. Israel’s and Turkiye’s interests in the region will bring about more confrontations,” noted Alemdar.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkiye “will not allow violations of its rights in the Aegean and the Mediterranean”, without naming the three countries or referring directly to their meeting.

Rear Admiral Zeki Akturk, the press and public relations adviser and spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence, sought to downplay the trilateral meeting, noting that it “does not pose a military threat to Turkiye”.

Turkiye, for its part, has also embarked on its largest naval procurement process, with a price tag estimated at about $8bn and 31 ships in the process of being built in 2025 alone to defend its interests in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The process has largely been driven by skirmishes between Greece and Turkiye dating back to 2020, when both parties used naval assets to lay claim to conflicting economic zones, and when Ankara realised it needed to invest more in its navy to avoid being squeezed out of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Turkiye’s regional approach

Analysts are also warning that Turkiye’s calibrated response to the trilateral meeting risks underestimating a broader pattern of Israeli provocations across multiple theatres.

From Syria to the Eastern Mediterranean – and, more recently, Somalia, following Israel’s recognition of the breakaway Somaliland region – Israel has demonstrated a willingness to exploit political fractures in ways that undermine state consolidation.

In Syria, this approach has been particularly visible and feeds into Israel’s policies in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Israeli bombing of the presidential palace and the Ministry of Defence in Damascus in July last year was widely seen as an attempt to weaken the Syrian government at a moment of renewed diplomatic engagement.

Turkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan warned in December that the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were “in coordination with Israel” to obstruct Syria’s stabilisation.

A recent Al Jazeera Arabic investigation obtained hours of leaked audio recordings of senior military officers from the regime of the ousted leader al-Assad, discussing plans to destabilise Syria and suggesting coordination with Israel.

Taken together, Israeli actions in Syria increasingly resemble a template for indirect pressure – not aimed at direct confrontation with Turkiye, but at constraining Ankara’s influence by entrenching instability along its southern flank.

In seeking to grind down Turkiye in Syria while advancing its naval strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean, “the result is a dual-pressure model that exhausts and distracts Turkiye, turning each move into a potential crisis and steadily eroding its initiative”, said the retired Turkish admiral Cem Gurdeniz.

Israeli recognition of Somaliland likely reinforces Turkiye’s concern that Israel is willing to legitimise breakaway coastal entities when doing so undercuts stabilisation efforts aligned with Turkiye’s maritime interests.

This approach also finds support within Israel’s ideological ecosystem. The right-wing political theorist Yoram Hazony, a close ally of Netanyahu, has openly argued for the fragmentation of regional states such as Iraq and Syria into smaller entities organised along sectarian or communal lines – a vision that aligns with policies privileging division over consolidation.

“Turkiye should stop treating this as episodic friction and treat it as Israel’s deliberate attempt to shape the post-Assad order in Syria while tightening a Mediterranean alignment that sidelines Ankara,” Andreas Krieg, associate professor of security studies at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera.

“The response needs to be practical, coercive in the political sense, and geared to results rather than signalling,” he added.

Turkiye has a track record of acting proactively when it believes its national interests are at stake. In Libya, Ankara’s military support for the internationally recognised government in 2020 prevented its collapse. Similarly, Ankara’s backing of Azerbaijan in its war with Armenia helped tip the balance, enabling Baku to recapture territory occupied by Armenian forces.

Israeli threats to destabilise Syria, Somalia and Yemen could provide Ankara with an opening with countries it has had rocky relations (since improved) with in recent years, mainly Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which increasingly are also threatened by Israeli influence in the region and have most recently condemned Israeli recognition of Somaliland.

Ankara should not only expand relations with such key Arab states, Krieg said, it also needs to take practical steps that make “alternative formats commercially and strategically attractive”.

“Turkiye will not dismantle that [Eastern Mediterranean] axis with rhetoric,” he added.

“Ankara should expose and disrupt Israeli influence operations rather than arguing about motives,” he warned, adding that “the point is to make it politically expensive for Israel to posture as a stabiliser while acting as a patron of breakaway structures,” said Krieg.

For Hani Naim, the wait is not for a cure, but for permission to save his own life.

Living with cancer for six years, Naim had been approved for treatment abroad. But like thousands of others, he remains trapped in Gaza, barred from leaving by tightening Israeli restrictions.

“I used to receive treatment in the West Bank and Jerusalem,” Naim told Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum. “Today, I cannot access any treatment at all. I need radiotherapy, and it no longer exists in Gaza.”

Naim is one of 11,000 cancer patients currently stranded in the enclave, where the healthcare system has collapsed entirely.

According to doctors, the number of cancer-related deaths has tripled since the October 2023 start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. With no chemotherapy, no radiotherapy, and no way out, a cancer diagnosis has become, for many, an immediate death sentence.

A ‘ghost hospital’

The epicentre of this crisis is the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital. Once the sole facility providing specialised oncology care in the Gaza Strip, it now stands as a hollowed-out shell.

“It resembles a ghost hospital after being turned into a military site during the war,” Abu Azzoum reported. “Israeli forces blew it up, leaving patients to fend for themselves.”

With the main facility destroyed, doctors have been forced into makeshift clinics with zero resources.

In an interview with Al Jazeera Mubasher, Mohammed Abu Nada, the medical director of the Gaza Cancer Centre, described a situation of total helplessness.

“We have lost everything,” Abu Nada said. “We lost the only hospital capable of diagnosing and treating cancer… We are now in Nasser Medical Complex, but unfortunately, we have no equipment to diagnose the disease, and we have no chemotherapy.”

‘Chocolates but no medicine’

Despite recent ceasefire agreements that were supposed to allow aid into the Strip, essential medical supplies remain blocked.

Abu Nada dismissed claims that aid is flowing freely, noting that while some commercial goods have entered, life-saving drugs have not.

“They brought in chocolates, nuts, and chips … but treatments for chronic diseases, cancer treatments, and diagnostic devices have not entered at all,” he said.

“This is just propaganda,” he added. “We appealed to the World Health Organization … to at least provide us with treatment if we are not allowed to leave. But on the contrary, what we had has run out.”

Abu Nada estimated that 60 to 70 percent of cancer protocols are completely unavailable. Because chemotherapy often requires a specific sequence of drugs, missing even one component renders the entire treatment ineffective.

Even palliative care is failing. Painkillers — essential for managing the agony of advanced cancer — are now being rationed.

“We try to prioritise,” Abu Nada explained. “Those with widespread cancer are given some, and those who are still on safe ground … we do not give them any.”

A silent killer

The human toll of these shortages is stark. Abu Nada revealed that in the Khan Younis area alone, two to three cancer patients die every single day.

“The result is that cancer spreads in the patient’s body like wildfire,” he said. “We have gone back 50 years in cancer treatment.”

Currently, 3,250 patients have official referrals for treatment abroad, but are unable to cross the border due to the closure of the Rafah crossing and Israeli bans on medical evacuations.

For the remaining medical staff, the psychological burden is immense.

“Some specialists have left Gaza,” Abu Nada said. “But even for those who remain, what use is a doctor without tools?”

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has vetoed a bill that would have reduced the prison sentence of his right-wing rival and predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted of plotting a coup.

On Thursday, Lula followed through with his promise to block the legislation, which had passed Brazil’s opposition-controlled Congress last year.

“In the name of the future, we do not have the right to forget the past,” Lula wrote in a series of social media posts, saying that it would have benefitted “those who attacked Brazilian democracy”.

The veto came on the third anniversary of the 2023 attack on the Three Powers Plaza in the capital of Brasilia, where government buildings representing the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court stand.

On January 8 of that year, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed the buildings in an apparent attempt to provoke a military response that would remove Lula from power.

In marking the anniversary of the attack, Lula called on Brazilians to stand up for their young democracy, which began after a period of violent dictatorship in the late 20th century.

“January 8th is marked in history as the day of democracy’s victory. A victory over those who tried to seize power by force, disregarding the popular will expressed at the ballot box. Over those who have always defended dictatorship, torture, and the extermination of opponents,” Lula wrote online.

“The attempted coup on January 8, 2023, reminded us that democracy is not an unshakeable achievement.”

Bolsonaro’s sentence

The January 8 attack caused millions of dollars in property damage and dozens of injuries, as police and protesters clashed in the government plaza.

The incident evoked comparisons to the violent riot at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, where supporters of President Donald Trump attempted to disrupt the certification of his 2020 election defeat.

Likewise, Bolsonaro, a former army captain, had refused to concede his defeat to Lula after a narrow loss in the 2022 elections.

Rather, he and his allies had argued that Brazil’s electronic voting machines were susceptible to fraud, and they challenged the election results in court. Their petition, however, was thrown out for its “total absence of any evidence”.

Still, many of Bolsonaro’s supporters backed his claims and took to the streets to protest the election results. The weeks surrounding Lula’s inauguration in January 2023 were fraught, with reports of a bomb threat and an attack on police headquarters in Brasilia.

Prosecutors later accused Bolsonaro and his allies of leading a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election results.

One of the options the defendants allegedly weighed was to declare a “state of siege” in Brazil, which would allow the military to take control and new elections be held. Another option was reportedly to assassinate Lula and his running mate, Geraldo Alckmin.

Bolsonaro has pleaded not guilty to the charges and denied any wrongdoing, framing the accusations instead as a political hit job.

Still, in September, he was sentenced to 27 years in prison after being found guilty on counts including attempting a coup, causing damage to public property, attempting the violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, participation in a criminal enterprise, and the deterioration of a listed national heritage site.

He began his prison term in November, after he was found to have damaged the ankle monitor used to ensure he was not a flight risk.

Weighing October’s election

Conservative politicians, however, have decried the prison sentence as excessive and called for its reduction.

Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo has petitioned the Trump administration in the US to intervene on behalf of the imprisoned ex-president, and his eldest child, Flavio Bolsonaro, even hinted he might suspend his 2026 presidential bid if his father were released.

On December 10, Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies passed legislation that would reduce the sentences of nearly 1,000 people linked to the January 8 attack, including Bolsonaro.

A week later, on December 17, the Senate followed suit, sending the leniency bill to the president for his signature.

But Lula had repeatedly pledged to reject the bill, risking the possibility that Brazil’s Congress could override his veto.

“ This is a bill that really is a litmus test in Brazilian politics,” Gustavo Ribeiro, a journalist and founder of The Brazil Report, told Al Jazeera. “Conservatives overwhelmingly supported it, while liberals are adamantly against it.”

Still, Ribeiro described the bill as a compromise between Brazil’s centre-right and far-right forces.

“The centre-right tried to work a sort of a middle-of-the-road solution that is not full amnesty but would allow Bolsonaro to leave incarceration after two years, in what we call in Brazil a semi-open prison sentence,” he explained.

He sees Brazil’s general election in October as a significant factor in Congress’s passage of the bill, noting that Bolsonaro remains a popular figure on the right.

“Because Bolsonaro has such a big clout with conservatives, many in Congress – many right-of-centre lawmakers – fear that if they do not lend their full support to any cause that Bolsonaro espouses, they will lose support,” Ribeiro said.

United States President Donald Trump has dismissed international law, saying only his “own morality” can curb the aggressive policies he is pursuing across the world after the abduction of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.

“I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt people,” Trump told The New York Times on Thursday.

Asked whether he needs to abide by international law, Trump said he does, but it “depends what your definition of international law is”.

Trump has shown a willingness to use the brute force of the US military to achieve his foreign policy goals.

On Saturday, the US launched an early-morning attack on Venezuela, with explosions reported across the capital Caracas and at Venezuelan military bases.

US troops ultimately abducted Venezuelan President Maduro from Caracas in what critics say was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”.

The attack on Venezuela appears to have supercharged the belligerence of the US president, who received the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize Award last month.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Trump said the US would “run” Venezuela and exploit the country’s vast oil reserves, though his administration has said it would cooperate with interim President Delcy Rodriguez.

Still, the Trump administration said it would “dictate” policy to the interim government and repeatedly threatened a “second wave” of military actions if US demands were disobeyed.

“If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” Trump said of Rodriguez in a Sunday interview with The Atlantic.

Earlier this week, Trump also suggested that the US may carry out a strike against Colombia’s left-wing President Gustavo Petro, and he has escalated his campaign to acquire the Danish territory of Greenland.

In June, Trump joined Israel’s unprovoked war against Iran, ordering the bombing of the country’s three main nuclear sites.

Trump aide Stephen Miller has criticised the post-World War II international order, saying that, from here forward, the US would “unapologetically” use its military force to secure its interests in the Western Hemisphere.

“We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower,” Miller told CNN on Monday.

But experts warn that disregard for international law could have catastrophic consequences for the entire global community, including the US.

International law is the set of rules and norms that govern ties between states. It includes UN conventions and multilateral treaties.

Margaret Satterthwaite, the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, told Al Jazeera earlier this week that US statements dismissing international law are “extremely dangerous”.

Satterthwaite said she is concerned the world may be returning to an “age of imperialism”, stressing that degrading international laws may embolden Washington’s adversaries to launch their own acts of aggression.

“International law cannot stop states from doing terrible things if they’re committed to doing them,” Satterthwaite told Al Jazeera.

“And I think that the world is aware of all of the atrocities that have happened in Gaza recently, and despite efforts by many states and certainly by the UN to stop those atrocities, they continued. But I think we’re worse off if we don’t insist on the international law that does exist. We’ll simply be going down a much worse kind of slippery slope.”

Yusra Suedi, an assistant professor of international law at the University of Manchester, warned against the belief that “might is right” and the trend towards disregarding international law.

“It signals something very dangerous, in that it gives permission to other states to essentially follow suit – states such as China, who might be eyeing Taiwan, or Russia with respect to Ukraine,” Suedi told Al Jazeera.

Ian Hurd, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, said history illustrates the perils of US policies in Latin America.

The region has witnessed more than a century of US invasions and US-supported military coups, leading to instability, repression and human rights abuses.

“There are innumerable examples historically of this, from Panama to Haiti to Nicaragua to Chile in the ’70s and on and on,” Hurd told Al Jazeera.

He added that Trump’s policies in Venezuela are “in line” with how the US has previously attempted to decide how other parts of the Americas are governed.