Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Monday that Jewish settlers’ demands to liquidate Palestinian President Yasser Arafat were extremely dangerous, reported AFP.
Following a meeting with Prime-Minister-elect Ariel Sharon early on Monday, two chief rabbis and settlers’ leaders demanded the assassination of Arafat and called him “terrorist.”
"We are at war," said Shlomo Filber, the secretary general of the Settlers' Council for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. "We have suffered more than 2,000 attacks in less than five months perpetrated by Arafat and his security forces. He [Arafat] must be liquidated and the apparatus he runs destroyed," Haaretz quoted Filber as telling Israeli Radio.
Erekat said that "these comments are threats which are extremely dangerous. It is a dangerous development and the world should come together to stop these actions and stop treating Israel as if it was above the law."
The Palestinian official added that the world must give protection to the Palestinian people who live under the occupation of a state that carries out terrorism against the Palestinian people.
Israel has carried out some 20 such killings since intense violence broke out across the region in late September.
Filber's comments came after two Jewish settlers were wounded in separate shooting attacks in the West Bank on Sunday.
"This man [Arafat] must disappear from our lives. He is a terrorist ... he leads a terrorist organization, and we are being sucked into a whirlpool of blood," Filber added.
Some 200,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with a similar number in east Jerusalem, said AFP.
Meanwhile, Israel’s housing minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told Haaretz that an attempt on Arafat's life would lead to "total war" between Israel and the Palestinians.
Meretz MK Zehava Gal-On said she understood the "terrible distress" of settlers beset by the daily ambush attacks of Palestinian gunmen, said Haaretz.
"Nonetheless, to officially urge the government of Israel to liquidate the head of the Palestinian Authority is to ask that the government of Israel operate as a terrorist organization.”
"In this situation, I must ask, what is the difference between the terror of individuals, which we condemn, and state terrorism," she said – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
