Ramallah, January 18: The chief of Israeli internal intelligence agency Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, threatened Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that Israel would launch a large-scale military operation in the West Bank if he did not ask for a deferral of the UN vote on the critical report on last year’s attack on the Gaza Strip, a report said on Sunday.
The daily Haaretz quoted Diskin as saying at a tense meeting with Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah in October that Israel will turn the Palestinian territory into a “second Gaza” if Abbas did not defer the vote on the Goldstone report.
According to the daily, Diskin, who reports directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, threatened to revoke the easing of restrictions on movement within the West Bank that had been implemented earlier last year. He also said Israel would withdraw permission for mobile phone company Wataniya to operate in the the Palestinian Authority-ruled territory. That would have cost the PA tens of millions of dollars in compensation payments to the company.
Haaretz quoted a PA official close to Abbas as saying that Diskin came to the presidential headquarters Al-Muqata’a in Ramallah in October with a foreign diplomatic delegation, and that a senior Israeli army officer made similar threats to other PA leaders at around the same time.
In response to the report, the Shin Bet said it does not comment on Diskin’s schedule or meetings.
The Gaza war report, conducted by a UN fact-finding mission led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, found that Israel committed war crimes in its offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians.
On Oct. 2, the Geneva-based Human Rights Council delayed the voting on the report until March and the PA delegation supported the delay, which sparked outrage among the Palestinians and Hamas for caving in to what many believed was pressure from the United States and its Western allies.
Abbas told a Palestinian commission of inquiry investigating the vote’s deferral that he accepted responsibility for the decision, and denied that his choice was a result of outside pressure.
——-Agencies