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Palestinian arrested over killing of Israeli: police
JERUSALEM, Feb 9, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – A Palestinian suspected of having killed
a young Israeli woman has been arrested in a raid in the West Bank city of
Ramallah, an Israeli police spokesman said on Saturday.
The body of Ori Ansbaher, 19, was found on Thursday evening in the south of
Jerusalem, and she was buried on Friday in the Israeli settlement of Tekoa.
The suspect comes from the flashpoint city of Hebron in the south of the
occupied West Bank, police said.
All other details of the woman’s killing remain the subject of an Israeli
gag order.
Previous Israeli statements about her murder came only from top diplomats
and politicians.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, accused the UN
Security Council of staying silent in the face of what he charged was the
complicity of the Palestinian Authority (PA) of president Mahmud Abbas in
such attacks.
“The PA maintains its policy of paying salaries for terrorists and
educating its youth with incitement, and a 19-year-old girl was brutally
murdered in Israel,” he said.
“The Security Council has the responsibility and moral duty to make a clear
condemnation of this barbaric murder and to act firmly against the culture of
terror in the Palestinian Authority.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed in a statement on Friday evening
that “the security forces will track down those responsible for this killing
and we will treat them with the full force of the law.”
Netanyahu’s principal challenger in an April 9 general election, former
armed forces chief of staff Benny Gantz, said he had full confidence in the
ability of the security forces to arrest the killer.
The West Bank was hit by a bout of unrest in December as tensions eased in
the Gaza Strip. but they later eased in the West Bank too.
The future of the West Bank is set to be one of the main issues of the
Israeli election campaign.
Gantz, who is running on a centre-right ticket, has hinted that he may be
ready to pull back from the territory as part of a peace deal with the
Palestinians.
Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners are campaigning for the unilateral
annexation of large swathes of the Palestinian territory.
Some 650,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank, including annexed east
Jerusalem.
The settlements are seen as illegal under international law and a major
obstacle to peace, as they are built on land the Palestinians see as part of
their future state.
BSS/AFP/GMR/1346 hrs