Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Why won’t the Palestinian ambassador condemn the Jerusalem massacre?

Mourners gather at the funeral of a victim of the Jerusalem synagogue attack (Credit: Getty images)

Husam Zomlot is head of the Palestinian mission to London and an adviser to the country’s president Mahmoud Abbas, currently in the 18th year of his four-year term. Zomlot was interviewed by Sky News’s Kay Burley this week in response to Burley’s interview with Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to Britain. Both interviewees were asked about the synagogue murders in Jerusalem last Friday, in which seven Israelis were killed. They were also asked about a prior Israeli raid on an Islamic Jihad terrorist cell in Jenin, which killed ten Palestinians, including a civilian woman.

At the outset of the interview, Zomlot complained about Hotovely’s characterisation of the synagogue murders. He accused his counterpart of having ‘failed to mention that the incident in Jerusalem happened in an illegal settlement and that it is squarely the responsibility of the Israeli government to send their citizens to practise illegality’. 

Just as she had confronted Hotovely on the Jenin operation, Burley asked Zomlot if he condemned the synagogue murders. Since he has claimed ‘misrepresentation’, I quote this part of the interview in full. For the sake of accuracy, Burley misstates the age of the perpetrator as 15. He was 21. 

Kay Burley: Fifteen-year-old boy kills seven Israelis, including a newly-married couple helping the injured, shot outside a synagogue on Holocaust Memorial Day. Do you condemn that?

Husam Zomlot: Every life lost is absolutely a tragedy, and no one works for a non-violent solution to this more than us.

KB: Do you condemn it?

HZ: No… I condemn the origin of all this. That’s what needs to be condemned. 

KB: So you don’t condemn that action?

HZ: (stutters) We can sit here until the morning to talk about condemnation. We must stop the cycle of violence. That’s what we need to do. And we must visit the root cause of this violence.

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