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Israel on Wednesday killed 65 people in West Bank, as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas lashed out at the people responsible for the kidnapping of 3 Israeli teenagers. The hunt for the Israeli youths enters its sixth day on Wednesday, as Israel continues its crushing drive against Hamas, who it blames for the kidnappings.
As Israeli troops continued to press their biggest operation in the occupied territory in years, imposing a lockdown on most of West Bank, Abbas criticized those responsible for the disappearance of the Israeli teenagers, and said that they were trying to “destroy” the Palestinian people. He also defended the coordination between Israeli and Palestinian security forces on the matter, leading the Islamist Hamas Movement to denounce his move.
At a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Saudi Arabia, Abbas said, “Those who kidnapped the three teenagers want to destroy us. We will hold them accountable.It is in our interest to have security coordination with Israel, because that would help protect us”, he said.
“We will never have another intifada — that would destroy us”, he added, alluding to any potential Palestinian uprising.
Hamas responded by saying that Abbas’ remarks were “harmful” to the fledgling reconciliation deal between it and Fatah, which, earlier in the month, led to an interim technocratic government replace the administrations in Gaza and West Bank. The exchange is the first major public sign of dispute between the two since they signed the unity deal in April, which brought to an end years of bitter rivalry. Experts say that Israel is trying to use its current military operation in West Bank to bring down the unity government founded with the support of its Islamist foe.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for Hamas, said, “President Abbas’s statements on security coordination with Israel are unjustified, harmful to Palestinian reconciliation”. He added that Abbas’ remarks in Jeddah were “a psychological blow to the thousands of Palestinian prisoners suffering a slow death in the occupation’s jails”, referring to about 5,000 detained being held in Israeli prisons.