The Palestinians today accused Israel of trying to wreck peace talks with plans to build 1,500 new settler homes in east Jerusalem, hours after Israel freed 26 Palestinian murderous terrorist prisoners.
A spokesman for terror-supporter Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, Nabil Abu Rudeina, said the move “destroys the peace process and is a message to the international community that Israel is a country that does not respect international law.”
Plans to build the homes in Yerushalayim emerged in Israeli media almost immediately after Israel began freeing 21 terrorist prisoners to the West Bank and another five to the Hamas-run Gaza Strip overnight.
Later, a senior Israeli official confirmed to AFP that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Interior Minister Gideon Saar had “agreed on four building plans in Jerusalem.”
The sequence was almost a mirror image of 13 August, when a first tranche of 26 terrorists was freed and Israel announced construction of more than 2,000 new homes, mostly in east Jerusalem.
The terrorist movement Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, called on Abbas’s western-backed Palestinian Authority to break off the talks, saying they encouraged Israeli settlement.
“It is … the PA’s negotiations with the occupation that are now providing (Israel) with a cover for these crimes,” Hamas Spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement on Wednesday. Ahram Online
{Matzav.com Israel}
