Netanyahu: International community must pressure PA to release succah guests
The four Palestinians were part of a group of 30 Palestinians who had attended a Succot celebration at the home of Efrat council head Oded Revivi on Wednesday morning.
By TOVAH LAZAROFFUpdated: OCTOBER 23, 2016 22:14Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the international community to pressure the Palestinian Authority to release four Palestinians who were arrested for visiting a succah in the Efrat settlement.“I call on the international community to work to help free these innocent Palestinians whose imprisonment is yet one more proof of the Palestinian refusal to make peace,” Netanyahu said in a statement he posted on his Facebook page Sunday toward the end of the Succot holiday.The four Palestinians, from the West Bank village of Wadi al Nis, were part of a group of 30 Palestinians who had attended a Succot celebration at the home of Efrat council head Oded Revivi on Wednesday morning.Upon their return home, Palestinian security forces arrested the four Wadi al Nis residents.Efforts by Revivi to secure their release have so far been unsuccessful.“According to senior PA officials, they will be sentence and jailed for the crime of normalization with Israel,” Netanyahu said.He used the incident to issue a global attack on left-wing human rights organizations. “Where is the outrage of the human rights groups? There is none. They are shamefully silent,” Netanyahu said.These are the same organization that have little to say when the PA gives salaries to the families of terrorists, glorify murderers and name streets after them, Netanyahu said.Their silence on this issue proves that they are more interested in bashing Israel than in human rights, he added.Revivi, for whom the event in his succah was part of a larger initiative to build bridges with the villages around his community, also called on the PA to free the four men.
“It's time the Palestinian Authority asks itself whether it would prefer to fan the flames of conflict instead of working to bring people together,” said Revivi, who is also the chief foreign envoy for the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea and Samaria.