Turkey's presidency says Erdogan urged Trump to keep negotiating with Iran

The Turkish presidency said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan telephoned US President Donald Trump on Monday to press him to keep the negotiating track with Iran open and to pull back from escalation, and to put Ankara at Washington's disposal in any effort to reach a settlement.

The presidency's account of the call places Gaza in it as well. Erdogan told Trump that attacks on Palestinians in the Strip have grown heavier since the peace plan Trump himself sponsored moved into its second phase — a judgement delivered to the plan's author about the stretch of the war the plan is meant to be governing.

The two leaders also went over the defence agreement Turkey signed with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and the state of relations between Ankara and Washington, according to the same statement. No account of the conversation has been issued from the American side.

Erdogan set out the reach of that pact separately, in an interview with the Al Jazeera Arabic programme Al Muqabala aired on Sunday. Asked whether other states in the region might join, he said the doors would be open to Egypt, which cuts against reports that Cairo had been kept out of the three-way arrangement.

What Ankara is offering in the call is a channel rather than a proposal: no terms were made public, and the presidency described support for talks, not a plan of its own. The offer still marks out where Turkey wants to stand — as the party that carries messages between Washington and Tehran — at a moment when the Strait of Hormuz has been closed in effect for months and shipping there is being hit.

For Palestinians in Gaza the substance of the call is the one sentence about phase two. It is the complaint the eight foreign ministries put in writing on Sunday, now repeated privately to the president whose plan it is, and it concerns a period that was supposed to consolidate a truce rather than deepen a toll.