BICOM

US Vice President Joe Biden continued his visit to Israel yesterday, publicly criticising Palestinian incitement to violence and the Palestinian leadership’s failure to condemn terror.

Biden arrived in Israel on Tuesday and met former-President Shimon Peres in Jaffa, not far from where a terror attack was unfolding. A Palestinian man stabbed and killed an American tourist, seriously wounding several others. It was one of three terror attacks on Israelis during the same day. Addressing the violence, during a joint press conference with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden said, “They’re targeting innocent civilians, mothers, pregnant women, teenagers, grandfathers, American citizens.” He added, “There can be no justification for this hateful violence, and the United States stands firmly behind Israel’s right to defend itself.”

Biden then took aim at the Palestinian approach to the violence, saying, “The kind of violence we saw yesterday, the failure to condemn it, the rhetoric that incites that violence, the retribution that it generates, has to stop … This cannot become an accepted modus operandi.” Israeli leaders across the political spectrum have long complained that incendiary rhetoric from Palestinian leaders, including Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas helps stoke the near-daily attacks which have killed at least 31 Israelis since October.

Netanyahu yesterday noted that Abbas’s Fatah faction had praised the Jaffa terrorist. He said, “Unfortunately, Abbas has not only refused to condemn these terror attacks. His Fatah party portrays the murderer of this American citizen as a Palestinian martyr and hero.”

Biden met with Abbas yesterday evening, who claimed that Israeli policy is “behind the violence and bloodshed.” Although Abbas expressed his condolences over the American citizen murdered in Jaffa, he did not condemn the killing itself. Meanwhile, Abbas sent a letter of condolence to the family of a female Palestinian terrorist who was last week shot dead while attacking Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. In the letter, Abbas called her “a martyr who watered the pure earth of Palestine with her blood.”