Monday, January 30, 2023

Former top security official: If Abbas’s PA won’t fight terror, why should it exist?

Israel’s former national security adviser charged that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s failure to fight terrorism was a deliberate and risky gamble, but argued that Israel should not let the weekend terror attacks dictate the agenda of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit this week.

“It’s a dangerous game,” Meir Ben-Shabbat, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top security aide from 2017 to 2021, told The Times of Israel on Sunday. “If it’s intended as a lever to pressure Israel, it’s dangerous for Abu Mazen [Abbas’s nom de guerre] first and foremost.”

On Friday night, a Palestinian gunman from East Jerusalem killed seven people and injured three more in the Neve Yaakov neighborhood of Jerusalem, and the next morning, a 13-year-old Palestinian shot and wounded two Israeli men near the Old City. READ MORE