Right-wing lawmakers on Friday called for Israel to annex the entirety of the West Bank after security officials said an Israeli teenager had been killed in a terror attack in the
Ramallah area.
Seventeen-year-old Rina Shnerb was killed when a homemade explosive device detonated near a natural spring outside the settlement of Dolev where she was sitting with her family. It was not yet clear whether the bomb had been planted there in advance or hurled at the family. Shnerb’s rabbi father and 19-year-old brother were critically injured in the attack, and Israeli security forces launched a manhunt for the perpetrators.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his “deep condolences” to the family and vowed to “continue strengthening” Jewish communities in the West Bank. Though he did not explicitly promise to extend sovereignty over the territory claimed by Palestinians for their future state, he promised to “spread our roots deeper and strike out at our enemies.
“Security forces are in pursuit of the vile terrorists. We will reach them. Our long arm will pay them their dues,” Netanyahu vowed.
Avigdor Liberman, the leader of the Yisrael Beytenu party who has in recent months become Netanyahu’s bitter enemy, blasted the prime minister’s policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians, calling the attack “a slap in the face to [his] policies of surrender.”
The Netanyahu government “has chosen to abandon the security of Israeli citizens in favor of buying quiet from the Palestinian Authority and Hamas until the elections,” he tweeted Friday afternoon.
The new right-wing union Yamina headed by Ayelet Shaked also called on Netanyahu to extend Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank in response to the attack. It blasted what it said was the current policy of “containment” in a statement.
