Senior Israeli and Turkish officials held a secret meeting in Rome on Monday to renew talks on a reconciliation agreement between the two nations, an Israeli daily reported on Monday. According to the Haaretz daily, Israel's Foreign Minister director general Dore Gold and his Turkish counterpart, Feridun Sinirlioğlu, who is the government person responsible for ties with Israel, met in Rome after Gold left for Rome "secretly." The report said the Israeli official did not make his plans known to either National Security Advisor Yossi Cohen, nor the Israeli Prime Minister's Office's special envoy to Turkey, Joseph Ciechanover, who has handled ties with current president and former Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government for five years. Instead he communicated with Sinirlioğlu. The report also quoted a senior Israeli official as saying that before Gold left for Rome, there was no official discussion on the status of negotiations with Turkey. Diplomatic ties between Turkey and Israel declined after May 2010, when Israeli commandos killed eight Turkish citizens and an American of Turkish origin in international waters on the Mavi Marmara ship. The Mavi Marmara was leading a "Gaza Freedom Flotilla" carrying humanitarian aid for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007. The Israeli ambassador was expelled from Ankara in September 2011 after Israel refused to apologize for the killings. Israel formally apologized in 2013 for what it called "operational mistakes" that might have led to the deaths of the victims. Turkey and Israel have been negotiating a compensation deal, but an agreement has not yet been forthcoming. After Israel's Gaza offensive in the summer of 2014, comments about Israel by President Erdoğan have caused the rift between the two countries to widen. Erdoğan said in July that Israel had agreed to lift its blockade of Gaza as part of normalization talks between Israel and Turkey but that Israel's attack on Gaza revealed that it does not want normalization, and therefore Turkey would delay the continuation of talks.
