Untitled - orsam

Speaking to foreign correspondents, he said he wouldn’t have agreed to a settlement
freeze in the first place, and that it was more important to focus on larger issues like final
borders, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem. But he said he
would not turn down a request from Israel’s closest ally and endanger ties.
“If someone says that he agrees to 10 months of freezing and the president of the
mightiest nation on earth and friendliest nation to Israel comes to you and says, ‘Please
give me two *more+ months, only two months,’ I mean, what could happen in two
months?” he said. “I would say, ‘President, why two? Why not three? Take three!”
Olmert suggested that both Netanyahu and the Obama administration were wasting
valuable time on a marginal issue.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, said the PA Information Ministry’s recent denial of the link
between the Jewish people and the Western Wall, reported earlier this week in The
Jerusalem Post, “calls into serious question *the PA’s+ intentions of reaching a peace
agreement, the foundations of which are coexistence and mutual recognition.”
Branding the Palestinian “study” on the matter “reprehensible and scandalous,”
Netanyahu said that “this is not the only instance in which Palestinians are trying to
distort historical facts in order to deny the deep and historic link between the Jewish
people and its homeland.”
He called on the PA leadership to disavow and condemn the document. (Jerusalem Post)
Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar said the US was “wasting our time” with efforts to forge a
peace deal and that “resistance” was the most effective way for Palestinians to get Israel
to withdraw from the West Bank, in an interview published Thursday.
“If there is a real resistance against Israel, then Israel will leave,” Zahar, who co-founded
Hamas 23 years ago and remains one of its two top figures in Gaza, said in an interview
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