Egyptian and Turkish warships are taking part in a joint exercise off Alexandria, conducting surface-warfare, anti-submarine and air-defense exercises alongside underwater special-operations training. The naval exercise, called Sea of Friendship 2026, is scheduled to conclude on November 9. It marks the second round of joint naval drills since Cairo and Ankara resumed them after a 13-year hiatus in September 2025. This is not a courtesy visit. It follows a July letter of intent on defense-industry cooperation and joint capability development, part of a warming that began before the two countries restored ambassadorial relations in 2023.
Egyptian pilots have even flown alongside Turkish ones this year, at a separate air exercise in central Turkey that also included NATO assets. During an earlier Cairo visit, Turkey’s state-owned defense manufacturer MKE reportedly signed a $350 million export and industrial cooperation agreement with Egypt’s military.
On Saturday, Cairo reopened the historic headquarters of its embassy in Tripoli, whose building had been closed since 2014 even though Egypt had resumed diplomatic operations in the city in 2021.
None of this makes Egypt into Turkey’s ally. It makes Egypt a country doing business with a government whose ambitions it still distrusts, sometimes furiously. Three weeks ago, Libya’s eastern parliament approved the ratification of its controversial 2019 maritime memorandum with Turkey, reversing its previous opposition to the agreement. Greece’s foreign ministry rejected the decision on October 20, declaring the memorandum illegal and null and void. Egypt rejected the vote within a day. Then, on Saturday, Cairo reopened the historic headquarters of its embassy in Tripoli, whose building had been closed since 2014 even though Egypt had resumed diplomatic operations in the city in 2021. During the visit, Egyptian officials also discussed trade, investment and energy projects with the western Libyan government Turkey has spent years courting.
Israel noticed too, twice. Its foreign ministry condemned the Libyan vote the day after it passed, calling it an infringement on the rights of its regional partners. Then, on Thursday, senior defense officials from Israel, Greece and Cyprus met in Athens and said the same memorandum infringes on the sovereign rights of third states and carries no legal weight for them. They also agreed to build a joint defense-industry working group. It was a useful statement. It was also just a statement. Gas platforms, undersea cables and shipping lanes in a contested sea need more than a joint declaration to stay protected, and Ankara has just gained a political opening in eastern Libya it did not have a month ago.
Maritime maneuvering is only one front. The second runs through Turkey’s oldest war. The PKK announced over a year ago that it would disband and lay down its weapons after founder Abdullah Ocalan told it to. Turkey’s own foreign minister said in September that concrete disarmament steps had not materialized. A limited withdrawal, reported by Turkish security sources, saw the PKK evacuate four shelters in the Metina region of northern Iraq on October 8, the first visible movement in months, though still far short of proof that disarmament is real. Parliament has already passed a law providing for the suspension of certain investigations and prosecutions, as well as the deferral of the execution of certain sentences, once security institutions confirm that the PKK has ended its activities and surrendered its weapons. The National Security Council must subsequently confirm that determination in a decision published in the Official Gazette. A cross-party parliamentary monitoring committee was announced in late October, but the legal trigger has not been pulled yet.
If disarmament ever does become real, the payoff for Ankara is substantial. Four decades of counterinsurgency have eaten Turkish money, manpower and political attention. A genuine end to that war would not hand Erdogan a spare army to point at Israel. But it would free resources and focus he has had no choice but to spend at home, and a government with fewer fires burning inside its own borders is a government with more room to act beyond them.
The arrangement could allow Ankara to shed a politically costly outpost while pursuing its security priorities through closer coordination with Baghdad, particularly over the PKK’s presence in Sinjar.
A similar adjustment is underway next door. Turkey and Iraq struck an understanding on September 23 covering the gradual handover of the Bashiqa-Zilkan base near Mosul, a military foothold that had irritated Baghdad for a decade. On November 8 the two governments confirmed it again in a fresh joint statement: Ankara said it would begin the necessary steps toward gradually transferring Bashiqa-Zilkan to Iraq’s federal government, and both sides agreed to operationalize the Joint Security Coordination Committee to monitor developments in Sinjar, where Baghdad has been bringing members of the Yazidi Sinjar Resistance Units under federal military authority. No date is attached to the handover, and Turkey keeps other bases in Iraq. The arrangement could allow Ankara to shed a politically costly outpost while pursuing its security priorities through closer coordination with Baghdad, particularly over the PKK’s presence in Sinjar.
Syria delivered the bigger shift of all, and it came the hard way first. A Syrian government offensive in January captured large swaths of territory previously controlled by the SDF, and the integration that followed owed as much to that defeat as to diplomacy. In August, SDF commander Mazloum Abdi announced that the force’s mission had ended and that it was dissolving as an independent military force following the integration of its fighters into Syrian army brigades. That formally ended the independent Kurdish-led military command Turkey had long regarded as a PKK-linked threat on its border, without a direct Turkish military offensive. Questions remain about Kurdish political rights, local governance and who controls those newly integrated units. But the SDF no longer formally exists as an independent military force, removing one of the most significant Kurdish-led military structures Turkey had long regarded as a direct security threat.
Put these pieces on one table and a pattern appears that none of them show on its own. Turkey is drilling with Egypt’s navy while competing against Egypt over Mediterranean boundaries. It has a fresh political opening in eastern Libya. Its forty-year conflict with the PKK remains unresolved, but an unprecedented and still fragile disarmament process is underway. Its most awkward base in Iraq is being quietly wound down, and the Kurdish force that worried it most in Syria no longer exists as an independent army. The Mediterranean moves happened in three weeks. The Kurdish and Syrian ones took far longer to arrive. None of this proves Erdogan is preparing to confront Israel directly, and he still faces real limits of money and competing priorities at home. Taken together, these developments could reduce some of the constraints on Ankara’s regional ambitions, giving Erdogan greater room to concentrate on the Eastern Mediterranean.
Israel does not need to panic about a Turkish fleet showing up tomorrow. It needs to stop being surprised by one a year from now.
Israel’s response should match the scale of that pattern, not just the headlines feeding it day to day. A trilateral statement with Athens and Nicosia is a decent start, not a finished strategy. What actually protects gas platforms and export routes is maritime surveillance that runs around the clock rather than after a crisis, intelligence sharing that happens before trouble starts, and defense-industrial projects that survive. Cairo is still worth courting as well, and worth keeping separate from Ankara in Israeli thinking. Egypt’s rejection of the Libya deal was not a favor to Israel, it was Egypt protecting its own interests, and that self-interest is exactly what keeps the door to Cairo open for now, whatever joint naval exercises Cairo and Ankara stage next year.
Over recent months, Turkey’s regional position has shifted: through its new political opening in eastern Libya, developments in the mountains of northern Iraq, the gradual handover of its base outside Mosul, and the transformation of the military order across northeastern Syria. None of those four stories led with Israel’s name, and all four end up at its door anyway. Every account Erdogan brings closer to settlement could give him more freedom to open a new one, and the Eastern Mediterranean is the obvious place to spend it. Israel does not need to panic about a Turkish fleet showing up tomorrow. It needs to stop being surprised by one a year from now.
Published originally on November 9, 2026.
