An influential Israeli rabbi has said god should strike the Palestinians and their leader with a plague, calling for their death in a fiery sermon before Middle East peace talks set to begin next week.
"Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this earth," Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual head of the religious Shas party in Israel's government, said in a sermon last night, using Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's popular name.
"God should strike them and these Palestinians - evil haters of Israel - with a plague," the 89-year-old rabbi said in his weekly address to the faithful, excerpts of which were broadcast on Israeli radio today.
The Iraqi-born cleric has made similar remarks before, most notably in 2001, during a Palestinian uprising, when he called for Arabs' annihilation and said it was forbidden to be merciful to them.
He later said he was referring only to "terrorists" who attacked Israelis. In the 1990s, Rabbi Yosef broke with other Orthodox Jewish leaders by voicing support for territorial compromise with the Palestinians.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said the rabbi's latest comments were tantamount to calling for "genocide against Palestinians". The rabbi's remarks, he said, were "an insult to all our efforts to advance the negotiations process".
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr Abbas are due to resume direct peace talks in Washington on Thursday, the first such negotiations in 20 months in a peace process that commits both sides to avoid incitement, which has included anti-Jewish sermons by Palestinian clerics.