(Bloomberg) -- Turkey is looking to join South Africa’s case at the United Nations’ highest court as a plaintiff accusing Israel of committing genocide in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.

“I would like to announce it for the first time that we have decided to join South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice,” Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said on Wednesday at a joint news conference with his Indonesian counterpart. 

South Africa filed its case at the ICJ in December. The following month, the court told Israel that it must act to prevent the killing and harm to innocent Palestinians in an interim ruling that stopped short of demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. 

Fidan said Turkey has spent “a while” preparing a formal application to join the case. “We will finalize the legal work and then work on what more we can do with allied countries,” he said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called Hamas militants “freedom fighters” and repeatedly criticized Israel’s conduct in the war, a response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas in which some 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage. 

Unlike the US and the European Union, Turkey doesn’t consider Hamas a terrorist organization.

More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave. The figures don’t differentiate between combatants and civilians and Israel claims a third of them are fighters. 

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