Turkey, Egypt Place Onus on Israel in Gaza Fighting

Egypt and Turkey put the onus on Israel on Saturday to end the fighting around Gaza as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Cairo a day after Washington urged the two governments to pressure the Palestinians.

Erdogan, who headed straight into talks with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi after landing in Cairo, blamed Israel for the latest upsurge in violence.

"It's a tactic of Israel's to point the finger at Hamas and attack Gaza," he told reporters in Ankara before leaving for Cairo.

"Israel continues to make an international racket with its three dead." he said of three Israelis killed by a rocket fired from Gaza by Hamas militants. "In fact it is Israel that violated the ceasefire."

After a meeting with his counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu, Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamel Amr said they both agreed on "denouncing Israel's aggression and on the need to swiftly stop this aggression."

A foreign ministry spokesman later issued a statement expressing "astonishment at the international community's feeble stance towards this aggression, and some countries' attempts to blame the Palestinians."

"All that's left is to blame the children in Gaza for standing under Israeli missiles," the spokesman, Amr Roshdy, sarcastically added.

Erdogan's visit, with more than a dozen ministers and a large entourage of Turkish businessmen, had been planned for weeks.

But the fighting in Gaza, which escalated on Wednesday when Israel killed Hamas's military chief in an air strike, has overshadowed Turkey's largest ministerial and trade mission to Egypt in decades.

Both Egypt and Turkey have in the past mediated ceasefires and a prisoner exchange between Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers.

Ahmed al-Jaabari, the military chief killed in Wednesday's air strike, was Hamas's pointman in those mediation efforts.

Both countries have longstanding relations with the Jewish state that have grown increasingly cold in recent years over Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.

Morsi, elected in June after a popular uprising overthrew veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak early last year, recalled his ambassador in Tel Aviv after Wednesday's air strikes and sent his prime minister to Gaza in a show of support.