Netanyahu Calls UK’s Palestine Recognition ‘Absurd Prize for Terrorism’

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, called the UK’s recognition of Palestine on Sunday “an absurd prize for terrorism”.

In remarks to ministers released by his office, he said Israel would have “to fight both in the UN and in all the other fronts against the slanderous propaganda aimed at us, and against the calls to create a Palestinian state that will endanger our existence and constitute an absurd prize for terrorism”.

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Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Netanyahu, said Hamas could now say to the Palestinians that without its 2023 attack, which killed about 1,200, the recognition of Palestine by the UK and others would not have happened.

“It will be understood as a reward to them, and Starmer has lost any leverage that he had … and [a Palestinian state] is not going to happen anyway,” said Amidror, an analyst at the conservative Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America in Washington.

“Israel is determined to destroy the terrorist organisation that is called Hamas. Some of our friends around the world have decided that Hamas should survive and Israel should leave the Gaza Strip, taking our hostages … There is a gap here that cannot be bridged with nice words.”

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Read the full piece in The Guardian.