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 The burnt body of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khudair was discovered
in a Jerusalem forest last week. Six Jews have been arrested in what
police suspect was a revenge attack for the abduction and killing of
three Jewish youths.
"I wish to express my shock and the shock of Israel's citizens over
the despicable murder of your son," Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu told the father, Hussein Abu Khudair, according to the
statement.
"The murderers will be brought to trial and prosecuted to the full
extent of the law," the right-wing leader added, according to the
statement, a day after Israel announced that six Jewish suspects,
whom it did not identify, were in custody.
Hussein Abu Khudair was not immediately available for comment. Other
family members, echoing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, have
accused far-right Jewish settlers of killing the teenager.
The youngster's death has triggered street clashes between angry
Palestinians and Israeli police in East Jerusalem, violence that has
spread to Arab towns and villages across Israel.
Israelis also have been angered by the deaths of the three Jewish
teens, who disappeared in the occupied West Bank on June 12. Their
bodies were found in the territory last Monday.
Israel says that Hamas militants killed them - an allegation the
Islamist group, now locked in daily cross-border fighting with
Israel along the Gaza frontier - has neither accepted nor denied.
After the Israeli youngsters' funerals on Tuesday, crowds in
Jerusalem blocked roads and chanted "Death to Arabs". Several people
tried to attack passing Arabs.
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Israel's outgoing president, Shimon Peres, and his successor, Reuven
Rivlin, promised in a joint editorial published in Yedioth Ahronoth,
the country's best-selling newspaper on Monday, there would be no
cover-up in the investigation of the Palestinian's death.
Cautioning that "words can kill", they also appealed for an end to
incitement by both sides in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
"The bloodshed will stop only when we all understand that it is not
our unhappy fate to live together, but rather our destiny to do so,"
Peres, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Rivlin, a veteran
right-wing politician, wrote.
(Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Andrew Heavens)
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