An oversized billboard that looms over a major highway into Turkey’s capital Ankara depicts Benjamin Netanyahu as a pig next to a red swastika and the words: “Baby killer Israel”.
A few hundred miles away in Istanbul, a storefront sign warns Israel, as well as the US and Europe, that they will “drown in the blood you spill”, while protesters outside the city’s historic Egyptian spice market hoist placards calling for the “defeat” of the Nato alliance of which Turkey is a member.
Bursts of anti-Israel and anti-western rhetoric are not unusual in Turkey, but such sentiment is on the rise as the war in Gaza rages, fanned by the increasingly bellicose tone of the country’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.