A lot of people complain about PM Netanyahu for a variety of reasons, but it's times like this when he earns his medals:
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Friday said he would ignore the international community's condemnation of prospective building plans for Jerusalem across the Green Line, in an interview aired in part on Channel 2.
The interview is scheduled to air in full on Saturday.
"The Western Wall is not occupied territory, and I don't care what the United Nations says," Netanyahu declared in reference to the plans.
"We are living in the Jewish State," Netanyahu said, and "The capital of the Jewish state, for 3,000 years, has been Jerusalem. I want to say it clearly."
"On election day, Israeli citizens will send a message," the prime minister continued, "not only domestically but also to the international community."
"Do you know who will be paying attention to the election results?," Netanyahu added, "[Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah, [and Hamas chief Khaled] Mashaal, they'll wait for polls to close and for results to be publicized. And they'll want to know if the prime minister was strengthened or weakened."
Netanyahu's statements came in the wake of widespread censure over preliminary plans to construct thousands of new apartment units in the E1 area of Jerusalem located across the Green Line.
In this regard, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Thursday issued veiled threats over the prospective plans, which came on the heels of France's questioning Israel’s commitment to peace and Quartet envoy Tony Blair's issuance of a sharp denunciation.
An official in the Prime Minister Office responded to the condemnations by repeating Jerusalem’s position that all Israel has done over the past three weeks is approve 3,000 housing units in Jerusalem and the large settlement blocs.
“Everything else is just planning and zoning, and all that in areas that will stay part of Israel in any final-status agreement,” the official said.
In the wake of a mysterious explosion in a Hezbollah weapons warehouse in southern Lebanon last week, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, on Thursday called on the UN Security Council to enforce Resolution 1701, which calls for the disarmament of Hezbollah and forbids any bearing of arms near the Israeli border.
“Hezbollah is expanding its munitions stockpile by unprecedented proportions,” Proser said. “Over 50,000 of the organization’s rockets threaten Israel and the entire region, in stark contravention to the Security Council’s resolution. This is a powder keg that the UN must deal with.”
Prosor also attacked the Lebanese group for concealing weapons in populated areas.
“Not only does Hezbollah continue to accumulate missiles and weapons, but it also uses civilians as human shields,” he said. “It’s no coincidence that the explosion in the storehouse took place only 300 meters from a school.”
The ambassador warned of the dangers of nonconventional weapons from Syria falling into Hezbollah hands and added that the international community could not afford to ignore the issue.
The air force commander also commented on the explosion in the weapons storage facility in southern Lebanon. ”Someone who goes to sleep with rockets should realize that is a very unsafe place to be in,” he mused.
A Kuwaiti newspaper claimed Wednesday that the explosion — near the border on Monday — was the result of a planned attack and that the facility housed Syrian-made missiles with biological and chemical warheads. Though the report didn’t finger Israel for carrying out the strike, it said the IAF had carried out attacks on weapons caches in the past.
The Syrian military has continued to fire Scud-type missiles, NATO’s top official said Friday, describing the move as an act of desperation of a regime nearing its end.
Although none of the Syrian rockets hit Turkish territory, Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmusen said the use of the medium-range ballistic rockets showed that NATO was justified in deploying six batteries of Patriot anti-missile systems in neighboring Turkey.
The United States, Germany and the Netherlands will each provide two batteries of the U.S.-built air defense systems to Turkey. More than 1,000 American, German and Dutch troops will man the batteries, likely from sites well inland in Turkey.
Syria’s use of missiles are “acts of a desperate regime approaching collapse,” Fogh Rasmussen told reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
A week ago, U.S. and NATO officials said the Syrians had used the ground-to-ground rockets for the first time in the nearly two-year conflict. Damascus immediately denied the claims.
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