Hours after an Israeli woman who was stabbed by Palestinian assailants in a West Bank settlement died on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rebuked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who criticized Israel’s settlement activity and said it was “human nature to react to occupation.”
Addressing the UN Security Council in New York, Ban condemned the recent wave of Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians, including the stabbings of two Israeli women on Monday in the settlement of Beit Horon.
However, “Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half-century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process,” he said.
Photo: Reuters
Israel’s continued settlement activities are “an affront to the Palestinian people and to the international community,” Ban said.
“So-called facts on the ground in the occupied West Bank are steadily chipping away the viability of a Palestinian state and the ability of Palestinian people to live in dignity,” he said.
In an unusually personal retort, Netanyahu said: “The words of the UN secretary-general give a tailwind to terrorism.”
“The Palestinian murderers do not want to build a state — they want to destroy a state and they say that out loud. They want to kill Jews wherever they are and they say that out loud,” Netanyahu said.
The diplomatic confrontation came amid tensions with the EU over its opposition to Israeli settlements and more than a week after Netanyahu clashed with US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro, who also publicly criticized Israel’s settlement policy, saying it raised “honest questions about Israel’s long-term intentions.”
“If, as it appears, we are in an extended period when there cannot be direct negotiations, we must find ways of preserving the viability of a two-state solution for the future — Israel’s only path to avoid becoming a binational state,” Shapiro said.
Netanyahu rejected Shapiro’s remarks, calling them “unacceptable and incorrect,” and criticized their timing, coming on a day when Israel buried a mother of six who was stabbed to death in the doorway of her home in the settlement of Otniel, and a pregnant woman was stabbed in the settlement of Tekoa.
Shapiro this week in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio said that “the timing was not the best.”
The victim of the latest knife attack, Shlomit Krigman, 23, was one of two women who were stabbed on Monday during an assault in the settlement of Beit Horon.
Krigman died in a Jerusalem hospital early Tuesday, several hours after the attack.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion