Fidan phones Dbeibah and Saddam Haftar to thank both Libyan camps for approving the Turkish–Libyan memorandum

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan spoke by phone on Tuesday, October 20 separately with Abdulhamid Dbeibah, prime minister of Libya’s Government of National Unity, and with Saddam Haftar, deputy commander of the Libyan National Army, after the House of Representatives unanimously approved the Turkish–Libyan memorandum. According to the pro-government Turkish daily Daily Sabah, citing sources in the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Fidan thanked both for the adoption of the Memorandum of Understanding on the Delimitation of Maritime Jurisdiction Areas between Turkey and Libya.

The calls show that Ankara is addressing both rival centres of power in Libya at once: the Tripoli government, with which it signed the memorandum in November 2019, and the eastern Libya of the Haftar family, home of the House that approved it, reversing its earlier rejection. Saddam Haftar had already welcomed the decision in his own statement.

Hydrocarbons and TPAO surveys

Daily Sabah recalls that the agreement was registered with the United Nations in October 2020, but that the Tobruk–Tripoli dispute had so far blocked its implementation. In 2022 the two countries signed a hydrocarbons memorandum, which opened the way for seismic surveys and drilling by Turkish companies. On June 25, 2025, Turkey’s state oil company TPAO signed a memorandum with Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) for a two-dimensional seismic survey in four offshore blocks off the Libyan coast, covering 10,000 square kilometres.

The newspaper writes that the agreement “confirms” Turkey’s maritime jurisdiction over a large part of the Mediterranean and “consolidates” its influence in the Eastern Mediterranean, and notes that Greece had tried to persuade Khalifa Haftar not to approve the deal. These are the Turkish side’s characterisations: the memorandum disregards the Greek islands, including Crete, and Athens and Brussels consider it null and void.

Null and void for Athens, Nicosia and the EU

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry had welcomed the House’s decision in its statement No. 202, invoking “equity”. The Greek Foreign Ministry described the memorandum “spurious, null and void”, stressing that Turkey and Libya have no opposite or adjacent coasts, and Cyprus also condemned it. The presidents of the European Council and the Commission, António Costa and Ursula von der Leyen, said the agreement does not comply with the Law of the Sea and is null and void. The same day Fidan was in Brussels, where he spoke at a European Policy Centre event.