On Thursday, Turkish local daily Yeni Safak reported that Turkish citizens have begun to boycott companies or nations which they feel support Israel, and one facet of this protest is citizens increasingly cancelling their Visa and Mastercard credit cards.

As a result, banks are reporting that they are having difficulty dealing with the unprecedented demand from citizens seeking to open accounts with the nation’s domestic payment system, called Troy, a product of the Interbank Card Center, based in Istanbul.

The shift is a measure of the anger of the citizenry over the financial support Western countries have given to Israel following attacks by Hamas militants on October 7th, and the resulting military action in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces in response.

The boycott has been given its own hashtag campaign, #TroyKartaGeçiyoruz (#WeGoToTroyKarta), by its supporters, which urges Turkish citizens to ditch their Western payment cards in favor of the locally issued payment systems. In recent days, more than 100,000 posts have lent support to the hashtag campaign.

Reports indicate the campaign has been highly successful with almost 19 million new Troy cards issued since it began.

Troy is the nation’s only domestically issued payment card. First launched in April of 2016, the system offers a number of financial services, including the issuance of credit cards, debit cards, and prepaid cards, as well as network processing. Troy’s cards are even accepted in the United States, on the Discover Card network.

Earlier in the week, Coca-Cola and Nestle products were removed by the Turkish parliament from restaurants within the campus of the parliament due to the companies’ purported support for Israel.