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.
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