Obama using 'blood libel' report to pressure Jewish state

TEL AVIV – Senior Palestinian Authority officials told WND the Obama administration offered their group guarantees that the U.S. would pressure Israel over a Palestinian state in exchange for the PA's withdrawal of support for immediate U.N. action over an investigation claiming Israel committed war crimes.

The PA officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told WND the guarantees include pressing Israel to agree to a two-year timetable to negotiate a Palestinian state set along the pre-1967 lines – meaning a state in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and eastern sections of Jerusalem.

The officials said the Obama administration hopes to set the timetable publicly before March. They said Obama's Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, presented the timetable to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in meetings here the past few days.

The PA officials said Mitchell specifically told the Palestinians the Obama administration will push for a state including much of eastern Jerusalem.

"Mitchell told us not to be worried about what happened in Jabel Mukabar. It was just a ceremony and won't create any facts on the ground," one senior PA official told WND.

The official was referring to a ceremony last week in which developers of a new, private, Jewish neighborhood in Jabel Mukabar, an eastern Jerusalem section, laid the cornerstone for their project, clearly ignoring Obama's demand to halt all Jewish construction in the area.

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PA President Mahmoud Abbas last week unexpectedly called for the U.N. to delay until March a vote on the report, authored by South African Judge Richard Goldstone, which claims both Hamas and Israel were guilty of war crimes during the Jewish state's defensive war in Gaza this past December and January.

The report claims Israel deliberately targeted civilians during the Gaza conflict, which started after Hamas refused to extend a cease fire, instead launching a rocket offensive against Israeli population centers.

The U.N. report has been slammed here as anti-Israel, with some officials calling it a blood libel. The report equates Israel, which worked to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza, to Hamas, a terrorist organization that utilized civilians as human shields and fired rockets at Jewish cities from Palestinian hospitals and apartment buildings.

During the Gaza war, Israel sent hundreds of thousands of text messages and placed tens of thousands of calls warning local Palestinians of incoming attacks against Hamas' military infrastructure in Gaza.

Israeli officials warned Goldstone's standards can be used against U.S. and British anti-terror operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Abbas' request that the U.N. Human Rights Council delay its vote on the Goldstone report shocked both Hamas and the Palestinian public. In Gaza, Hamas television broadcast scenes of Gazans throwing shoes at portraits of Abbas – a sign of disrespect in Arabic culture. Last week, Syria canceled a planned visit by Abbas to Damascus, while an Israeli-Arab political party urged him to step down.

Already, PA officials are backtracking from their position of urging the U.N. to delay the vote. Abbas ordered an "investigation" into how his government made the decision, although PA officials tell WND Abbas led the decision.

Last week, senior Abbas adviser Yasser Abed Rabbo called the move to delay the Gaza vote a "mistake."

While Abbas may be publicly backtracking, Israeli diplomatic sources told WND that during the Gaza conflict, the PA leader and other top Palestinian officials demanded that Israel pound rival Hamas' installations in Gaza.

Indeed, during the conflict, WND quoted diplomatic sources in Jerusalem stating Abbas had petitioned Israel to launch a massive military raid against his Hamas rivals in Gaza.

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