Stabbing of five Israelis abominable, says Abbas

PALESTINIAN president Mahmoud Abbas described as “abominable” a weekend stabbing attack which killed five Israelis, including a baby, in their beds in a West Bank settlement.

“This act was abominable, inhuman and immoral,” the Palestinian leader said in an interview in Arabic with Israeli public radio days after the grisly murder at the Itamar settlement near the northern city of Nablus.

Abbas said Palestinian security forces had joined forces with Israel to hunt down the killer or killers who were still at large.

The Palestinian Authority “did not have any advance knowledge” an attack was imminent, which could have helped to thwart it.

“We do not know (who was behind this) and we didn’t have any information which could have helped us stop this attack. If we had known, we would have tried to stop it with every possible means,” Abbas said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed Abbas’s remarks, but said such strong condemnations also need to be made in the Arab press.

“His words hold great importance in my eyes, but it is more important that he say these things on Palestinian radio, not just Israel,” the Haaretz daily quoted Netanyahu as telling Likud lawmakers.

The Palestinian leader, who spoke by phone with Netanyahu on Saturday night, said he had agreed with the Israeli premier to conduct a joint investigation into the incident, and he hoped to “swiftly arrest and bring to justice whoever was responsible for the murders.”

Meanwhile, Israeli forces continued the manhunt, focusing on the Palestinian village of Awarta, adjacent to Itamar.

Soldiers were going house-to-house, detaining all males over the age of 15 and fingerprinting them, Palestinian security officials said. So far, more than 300 people have been detained, including two Palestinian intelligence officials, they said.

The Israeli army refused to comment on the detentions.

The perpetrators broke into the family home late on Friday and in a frenzied stabbing attack killed five members of the Fogel family: three-month-old Hadas, four-year-old Elad, Yoav, 11, and their parents Udi and Ruthie.

Grisly pictures showed the victims lying in pools of blood in an attack widely believed to have been carried out by Palestinians.

Netanyahu blamed Palestinian incitement for creating an atmosphere which led to the killings.