Israeli Press
Board of Peace says Israel is implementing the plan Netanyahu rejected
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Officials on the Board of Peace, the body Washington created to run Gaza's transition, answered Benjamin Netanyahu's public rejection of their fifteen-point document by saying Israel is carrying it out anyway, the Israeli news site Ynet reported on Monday in a story by its diplomatic correspondent Itamar Eichner.
"We look at actual actions, less at words and declarations," the officials told Ynet. Israel, they said, would have gained politically had its declarations matched its deeds.
The board's account of those deeds is specific. Israel has stopped targeted killings, it says, is holding the ceasefire, and keeps its forces on the original yellow line across roughly 53 percent of the Gaza Strip, with nothing deployed beyond it.
Netanyahu said on Sunday that Israel had not agreed to the disarmament plan and would not pull back from its current lines until Hamas is completely disarmed. Bezalel Smotrich praised him for it.
"We look at actual actions, less at words and declarations."
Board of Peace officials, to Ynet
Nikolay Mladenov, the board's high representative for Gaza, told reporters that any Israeli withdrawal follows the verified decommissioning of weapons rather than a promise of it.
Inside the cabinet the pressure runs the other way. The settlements minister, Orit Strook, told Radio North on Sunday that the roadmap empties the demilitarisation of Gaza of its content, and called for a hard brake on both the withdrawal and the entry of the multinational force.
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