Israel's security services are poised to thwart any attempt to harm Israel's diplomats abroad, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday amid Iranian threats that it will avenge the attack last week on the T4 airbase near Homs, Syria, that has been attributed to Israel. Netanyahu has delivered a speech at an annual memorial ceremony for 16 employees killed in terrorist attacks, with 14 of them being assassinated abroad. The last fatality was in 2003, when former ambassador to Britain Shlomo Argov died of wounds from the attack 21 years earlier when three Abu Nidal terrorists shot him in the head in London.Foreign Ministry employees have also been killed in Kyrgyzstan, Jordan, the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, Turkey, Egypt and South Africa.Netanyahu noted that the practice of granting immunity to diplomats goes back to ancient Greece, and was reaffirmed at the 1815 Congress of Vienna.“But barbaric fanaticism does not take into account accepted rules of behavior honored for generations,” he said.Netanyahu cited the Iranian takeover of the US Embassy in 1979 as a watershed moment that set the tone for the future of “terrorism, terrorism and more terrorism.”“Terrorism crosses boundaries,” Netanyahu said, “and today – as was the case then [in 1979] – it is under Iranian auspices, and under the sponsorship of Islamic State. There is not a continent or country safe from terrorism. What we have to do is stand against them together – to build a strong dam of the civilized world against the flood of radicalism.Terrorists smell weakness, but they equally recognize power.With force and firmness, we will stop their aggression.”Later in the day, at a ceremony for the families of fallen soldiers at Yad Labanim in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said that the “existence of the individual and the freedom of the community depend on the willingness to stand up against those who seek our lives.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at a Foreign Ministry ceremony commemorating the nation's sixteen diplomats killed in service, states security services are prepared to foil possible attacks on diplomats by Iran.