BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Hebron governor Kamel Hamid on Sunday condemned a visit by the Israeli foreign minister to the Ibrahimi Mosque earlier in the day, calling it part of a “growing call for desecration of holy places and the creation of chaos.”
He also accused Lieberman — the second Israeli leader to visit the flashpoint Palestinian city this week — of “sabotaging the stability that the Palestinian National Authority has created in the city.”
Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman visited the mosque, known as the Cave of the Patriarchs in English, as part of his outreach to the extremist Jewish settler vote that forms an important constituency for his Yisrael Beitenu (“Israel is Our Home”) party, and comes amid the last days of Israel’s election season.
The visit also came only a week after he said that disloyal Palestinians should have their heads chopped off, comments made during an election rally in the coastal city of Herzliya that raised ire among Palestinians but went widely unremarked upon in the Hebrew-language press.
During Sunday’s visit, Lieberman was quoted by the Israeli press as saying that Hebron, a West Bank city where a few hundred Jewish settlers have forcibly taken over a few areas in the overwhelmingly Palestinian center, is a Jewish city and will remain as such.
He also took the opportunity of his visit to the mosque, which is holy to both Jews and Muslims, to strike out at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
He told the audience of settlers during his visit that the Israeli leader had signed the 1997 Hebron protocol that ended Israeli soldiers’ direct occupation of the newer parts of central Hebron, known as H1. The agreement left them in control of H2, however, where thousands of Palestinians and a few hundred Israeli settlers live
No comments:
Post a Comment