The Media Line: Turkey’s Libya Pivot Forces Israel To Recalculate in the Eastern Mediterranean 

Turkey’s Libya Pivot Forces Israel To Recalculate in the Eastern Mediterranean 

Ankara’s access to rival Libyan authorities could strengthen its disputed maritime claims and reshape regional energy planning 

By Jacob Wirtschafter / The Media Line 

[ISTANBUL] Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan was received at Khalifa Haftar’s family compound in Benghazi on Aug. 12, becoming the first Turkish diplomat of his rank to be welcomed in eastern Libya in more than a decade and giving Ankara diplomatic access to both halves of the divided country. 

The visit drew scrutiny from Israeli officials and commentators tracking Turkey’s Eastern Mediterranean expansion, put pressure on a Trump administration plan that depends on Egypt and Turkey coordinating rather than competing in Libya, and elicited celebration from Turkish pro-government commentators who cast the shuttle as evidence of Ankara’s growing regional reach. 

Libya has remained divided since the collapse of Moammar Gadhafi’s government in 2011. Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah’s internationally recognized Government of National Unity controls Tripoli and much of western Libya with Turkish military support, while Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army and allied institutions dominate the east and much of the south. Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Russia have backed Haftar. A 2020 ceasefire ended his forces’ failed campaign to capture Tripoli but did not reunify the country’s political, military or economic institutions. 

Fidan arrived in Benghazi after meetings in Tripoli, where he met Dbeibah. The following day, he continued to El Alamein on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast for talks with Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty. “Turkey does not consider Libya’s peace and stability separately from its own stability,” he told reporters. 

“Egyptian-American agreement on the Libyan file is a strategic necessity for both sides,” Hany El-Aasar, executive director of the Cairo-based National Center for Studies, told The Media Line. Egypt spent 2019 arming Haftar’s forces against a Tripoli government that Turkish drones and troops were defending, while Egypt and Turkey kept diplomatic relations downgraded for a decade. Their coordination now on the American-brokered political framework represents a reversal Cairo does not want to see undone. 

Kaan Devecioğlu of the Ankara-based Center for Middle Eastern Studies wrote in an analysis published this week that Fidan’s shuttle should be read “not as Turkey abandoning its former Libya policy, but as transforming the strategic gains established around Tripoli in 2019 into a broader architecture of influence extending across Libya.” Normalization with Egypt was, he wrote, “one of the most important regional changes making the Turkey-Haftar rapprochement possible.” 

Ankara’s intelligence chief İbrahim Kalın traveled quietly to Benghazi in 2023 without passing through Tripoli—a move Rome’s Institute of International Affairs described as the “true novelty” that shifted Turkey from exclusive Tripoli partner to interlocutor with both halves of the country. 

Hebrew-language Israeli commentary has been sharper. Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak of Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center, writing in Israel Hayom, described the 2019 Turkey-Libya maritime agreement as a border “that lacks geographic logic but serves Ankara as a strategic tool to control shipping routes and infrastructure on which the economies and security of Israel and the entire region depend,” warning that any Turkish assertion of authority “could turn into harassment of Israeli ships.” 

The Reichman University-affiliated International Institute for Counter-Terrorism described Turkey’s Libya-to-Horn-of-Africa footprint as a “crawling encirclement” that “quietly completes a move that threatens not only Israel’s security but also the arteries of its economy.” 

In Turkish pro-government media, the tone has been triumphalist. The daily Takvim described Fidan’s tour as a “diplomatic landing” in Libya and headlined that the Saudi Arabia-Turkey-Pakistan defense pact signed in Mecca on Aug. 7 had triggered “panic in Athens and Tel Aviv.” In Cairo the following day, Fidan told reporters that if Israel did not advance to the second phase of the Gaza agreement, “there will be radical steps that we, Turkey, Qatar and Egypt, must take.” 

During Fidan’s Tripoli meeting with Dbeibah, a map showing “Palestine from the River to the Sea”—a formulation that Israel treats as erasing its territory—appeared on a wall behind the two officials. Israel’s Foreign Ministry responded on X that Fidan “can save himself the trouble of giving lectures and issuing threats,” accusing Turkey of being “a headquarters for Hamas movement, hosting its leaders.” 

Fidan’s Benghazi meetings included Aguila Saleh, speaker of the eastern-based House of Representatives, and Belqasim Haftar, who runs the Libya Development and Reconstruction Fund—engagement with the political, security and economic hierarchy the Haftar family has built in eastern Libya. 

The US, Greece, Cyprus and Israel established the Eastern Mediterranean Energy Center at Rice University in Houston in June to promote energy development, infrastructure security and regional cooperation. The partnership strengthens an alignment that Athens, Nicosia and Jerusalem have built since 2019 as they challenge Turkish maritime claims. 

Those claims rest partly on the 2019 Turkey-Libya maritime delimitation agreement, which Greece, Cyprus, Egypt and Israel reject as disregarding their maritime rights. Ankara’s outreach to eastern Libya could make opposition there to the agreement less certain. 

Dr. Eldad Ben Aharon, senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt and author of the recently published Israeli–Turkish Relations at the End of the Cold War, cautioned against overstating Fidan’s success. 

“I would be cautious about describing the visit as a strategic breakthrough,” Ben Aharon told The Media Line. “It is certainly a notable diplomatic achievement for Ankara, but from an Israeli perspective it does not fundamentally alter the regional balance. Libya neither borders Israel nor poses a direct security challenge in the way that Turkish involvement in Syria or Gaza does.” 

The shuttle should be understood, he said, less as a policy reversal than as Ankara adapting its diplomacy to a changed regional environment while pursuing largely consistent long-term objectives. Egypt, Turkey and the United States continue to differ on a range of regional issues, but “all currently have incentives to preserve a minimum degree of coordination in Libya because stability has become a higher-order strategic objective.” 

Should Turkey consolidate its ties with both Libyan authorities while preserving the 2019 maritime memorandum, Ben Aharon said, “Israeli policymakers will increasingly have to factor Ankara’s Libya policy into their long-term energy and maritime planning.” 

Washington’s Bet, Under Fire 

The American initiative Fidan’s shuttle is helping to consolidate is Massad Boulos’ reported three-track framework: security integration, political cooperation and unified economic management. It reportedly proposes reunifying Libya’s rival governments in exchange for American oil investment and the release of Libyan state assets frozen abroad, with elections deferred rather than made a precondition. 

Boulos, President Trump’s senior adviser for Arab and African affairs, laid out the framework in Washington in April, projecting Libyan oil production of 1.6 million barrels a day in the short term and 2 million to 3 million by the end of the decade. Chevron won a Sirte Basin contract in February—the largest American oil move in Libya in decades. Exxon Mobil followed with an agreement covering four offshore blocks. 

Before the US and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, more than 20 million barrels a day of crude and refined products transited the Strait of Hormuz. Second-quarter 2026 flows averaged 4.9 million barrels a day as the war disrupted traffic through the waterway. Libyan crude has become one of Washington’s few near-term alternatives. 

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have also become involved in the diplomatic push. Together with Egypt and Turkey, they consult through the Regional Four, or R4, an emerging grouping formed to coordinate responses to regional crises. Pakistan has separately agreed to sell more than $4 billion in military equipment to Haftar’s forces and has begun mediating between Libya’s rival power centers with US and Saudi backing. 

Two days before Fidan’s Benghazi visit, Fawzi al-Mansouri, chief of military intelligence for Gen. Haftar’s Libyan National Army, was killed by a car bomb in Benghazi. In the same week, six drone strikes hit facilities at the Zawiya oil complex, including a strike that destroyed a gasoline tank containing 4.5 million liters belonging to state fuel distributor Brega Petroleum. 

General Electric withdrew its engineers from the adjacent 1,300-megawatt power plant, more than 700 megawatts of which was already offline. A drone hit the South Zawiya electrical substation on Aug. 12. An explosion at the same substation cascaded through multiple stations overnight into Sunday, blacking out Tripoli, Zawiya, Sabratha, Surman and Gharyan twice during the night, according to Libya’s General Electricity Company and Turkish state news agency Anadolu. 

The National Oil Corporation has warned that it may declare force majeure, allowing it to suspend contractual obligations, if the attacks continue. 

“We cannot deal with the drone strikes and the assassination as separate incidents, nor can we jump to the conclusion that a single plot lies behind them,” El-Aasar said. Libya’s security and energy institutions had come under pressure, he told The Media Line, at the moment Washington was trying to bind them together. 

A Libyan security source with detailed knowledge of the western Libyan militia network told The Media Line that the drones used in the Zawiya attacks were stolen from the warehouses of Abdel Ghani al-Kikli, the Tripoli militia commander known as Gheniwa who was killed in the May 12, 2025, clashes. 

The drones were taken, the source said, by a figure known as “Amo Mohammed al-Dabbashi,” who was himself killed months later. Control of the inventory then passed to al-Dabbashi’s cousin. 

The Petroleum Facilities Guard, a nominally state security body responsible for protecting Libya’s oil fields, pipelines, refineries and export terminals, has said its initial forensic investigation points to first-person-view drones launched from inside Libya. Such drones transmit live video to their operators, who fly them from the aircraft’s perspective. 

Some were controlled through fiber-optic cables rather than radio signals, making them highly resistant to conventional electronic jamming. The guard is divided into regional commands operating within Libya’s fragmented security system rather than functioning as a fully unified national force. 

Abdul Salam al-Zoubi, deputy defense minister in Dbeibah’s Tripoli-based Government of National Unity, met Boulos and other senior US officials in Washington in June, four days before Saddam Haftar met Secretary of State Marco Rubio. 

Saddam Haftar, who is being groomed as his father’s political successor and already commands eastern security forces, would head a new presidential council under the reported arrangement, while Dbeibah or his nephew Ibrahim would retain the premiership. National elections would be deferred to a later, unspecified stage. 

The Egypt-Turkey rapprochement is the bright spot in Washington’s Libya calculation. Their coordination on the Boulos framework suggests that neither country currently plans to make a countermove against the other’s Libyan allies. The United Arab Emirates, which backed Haftar for a decade, has not publicly commented on the Zawiya strikes. 

“For many in Libya, Boulos’ proposal lacks popular support because of its vagueness and lack of a clear vision for taking Libya toward stability and safety,” said Omar Khattaly, a Libyan-American analyst and business consultant who advises on the country’s political economy and visited Tripoli in late July. “To Libyans, it is a repeat of the same failed plans that ultimately contributed to the current chaos.” 

On the ground, Khattaly said, Libyans see Boulos “as a broker seeking financial benefits from possible future oil contracts and would rather see more direct involvement from the US secretary of state and the State Department.”