Turkish authorities have banned a concert planned for tomorrow in Istanbul by Enrico Macias after calls to protest the French singer’s pro-Israeli views.

The Istanbul governorate said in a statement that it had wanted to prevent any demonstrations on the sidelines of the concert “against the genocide of the terrorist state Israel in Gaza and its supporters”.

The 86-year-old singer told AFP that he has performed in Turkiye for 60 years and is “deeply surprised and saddened not to be able to see my audience, with whom I have always shared values of peace and fraternity.”

Macias, who was born into a Jewish family in Algeria, has on several occasions defended Israel’s lethal response to Hamas’s deadly October 2023 attacks.

“My problem is that I can’t stand the violence of the terrorists,” he said in an interview on YouTube in August. “And if there was violence on the Israeli side, it was because of Hamas,” he said, while saying he had “nothing against the Palestinians.”