Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas can sign as many treaties as he wants – even the Rome Statute – but the bottom line remains that Ramallah signatures do not a sovereign nation create. Without being a nation, one cannot indict a nation either.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu bluntly reminded Abu Mazen – the terrorist name by which Abbas is known in the Arab world – of that reality in remarks following a discussion at the prime minister’s office in Tel Aviv on Thursday.
“We expect the International Criminal Court to reject outright the Palestinian Authority’s hypocritical act because the Palestinian Authority is not a state,” Netanyahu stated. “It is an entity in alliance with a terrorist organization, Hamas, which perpetrates war crimes.
“The State of Israel is a nation of laws with a moral army that upholds international law,” he continued. “We will defend the soldiers of the IDF just as they defend us.”
Netanayhu met with officials on the Palestinian Authority’s accession to 20 international treaties in addition to joining the ICC.
Earlier in the day Abbas filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court at The Hague (ICC) accusing Israel of committing war crimes in “Palestine” at various times since June 13, 2014.
The move came one day after the United Nations Security Council voted to reject a resolution granting statehood to the PA and forcing Israel to withdraw by 2017 from all territories conquered in the 1967 Six Day War.