Yaalon: Abbas Gave Up Chance at Gaza Return

Israel gave the Palestinian Authority an opportunity to return to Gaza in the wake of Operation Protective Edge but they refused, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon charged on Tuesday, The Jerusalem Post reported.

“We tried to enable the Palestinian Authority to enter the Gaza Strip and they did not want to,” he said in a prerecorded video at the annual conference of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

“They are good at blaming us in the U.N. Security Council and in the ICC, but when they need to take responsibly they are gone,” Yaalon said.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas “does not want to enter Gaza,” he added.

He said that an arrangement had been made for a steady supply of goods into Gaza, to be coordniated by Israel, the PA and the United Nations. As matters stand, Israel and the U.N. are alone responsible for the traffic, he said.

The Palestinians, he acknowledged, “are threatening to collapse” the PA. “If they want, they will collapse it, but we do not have an interest in them collapsing it,” he said.

Israel, he said, prefers to have a stable PA in control in the region, rather than Hamas.

Yaalon stated that the differences between the Israelis and Palestinians are too large to be resolved through the creation of a two-state solution. “The gaps are huge. We have no meeting ground. We must internalize that we will not solve the conflict, but we have to manage it wisely,” he said.

“So let us be more modest” and not look for “ceremonies on the lawn.”

This article appeared in print on page 36 of the February 18th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.