WORLD NEWS SEPTEMBER 4, 2019 / 12:24 PM / UPDATED 8 HOURS AGO

Netanyahu pays homage in Hebron, in nod to rightist voters

Dedi Hayoun
4 MIN READ

HEBRON, West Bank (Reuters) - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a rare visit to a core ultra-nationalist Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, pledging a permanent Israeli presence there as he tries to rally right-wing votes for an election two weeks away.

With polls showing Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party neck-and-neck with centrist rivals, he has been playing up his hard tack against territorial concessions to the Palestinians pushed by international peacemaking efforts in recent decades.

Such diplomacy in the past saw Israel making way for limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank. That included the biblical city of Hebron, parts of which Netanyahu, during his first term in the late 1990s, handed over to the Palestinians while Israel retained control over a hardline settler enclave.

In what the settlers said was his first visit to Hebron since, Netanyahu spoke at a government-sponsored event in front of the Cave of the Patriarchs - a site sacred to both Jews and Muslims, where an armed settler killed 29 Palestinians in 1994.

The Israeli leader’s speech marked a different massacre - of 67 Hebron Jews by Arabs in 1929, under then British rule - an incident he described as having shaped his hawkish policymaking.

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