Top Turkish officials were reportedly asked to skip this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with Turkey's leader unhappy at the event organisers’ stance on Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

Bloomberg cited people familiar with the matter in reporting the event boycott on January 15.

The move could prove a blow to the attempts of Turkey’s new economic team to persuade global investors to help bankroll their efforts to restore Turkish economic policy to a conventional path that could lift the country out of its longstanding economic crisis. It is thought Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek was planning to attend the annual gathering of political and business leaders in Davos before Erdogan stepped in.

Erdogan’s intervention will also raise anxieties that the Turkish autocrat could derail progress made by Simsek’s team by insisting on a substantial dose of economic populism ahead of Turkey’s end-of-March local elections, in which Erdogan’s AKP party will attempt to win back cities including Istanbul and Ankara.

Klaus Schwab, the Davos forum’s founder and executive chairman, has condemned Hamas’ “terrorist attacks against Israel” in reference to the group’s killing of around 1,200 people in a surprise cross-border raid in October. He has also called for measures to protect the civilian population of Gaza, but his words angered Turkish politicians. 

Erdogan has said that Israel’s leadership are war criminals who must be convicted at the International Criminal Court (ICC). He has also defended Hamas as freedom fighters. Turkey has a long history of providing safe harbour to Hamas officials. It does not, unlike the US and the European Union, consider Hamas a terrorist organisation.

This is not the first time that Erdogan has used Davos to condemn Israel over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2009, he stormed out of a debate with Israel’s then-president Shimon Peres over an Israeli military operation in Gaza the previous year. He vowed not to return to Davos and has never been back.

Erdogan, however, has encountered some complications in his latest condemnation of Israel—despite the angry rhetoric he has hurled at Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers, Erdogan has not moved to restrict trade with Israel, such as the provision of oil to the country via a Turkish port, while he also faces accusations that Turkey’s armed forces have committed war crimes in attacks on Kurdish militants in northern Syria.

What’s more, in March last year the ICC was asked to investigate the Turkish government for claimed crimes against humanity committed in its pursuit and persecution of opponents around the world. And Erdogan’s commitment to using ICC justice to pursue Israel might be regarded as somewhat inconsistent given that he routinely ignores the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) when it issues verdicts demanding Turkey release jailed dissidents.

Feelings, however, continue to run high in Turkey over Israel’s killing of thousands of Gaza civilians, including children, in its war against Hamas. On January 14, an Israeli footballer playing for a Turkish club was arrested for an anti-Hamas goal celebration. Turkish media said he was due to be deported. 

Earlier this month, Turkey detained dozens of people for allegedly spying on behalf of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. The action came after Ankara warned it would respond to any plots to kill members of Hamas on its soil.