Benjamin Netanyahu visited Monday the kosher supermarket in eastern Paris where four Jews were killed when an Islamist gunman stormed the store of Friday.
Accompanied by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu paid tribute to the victims at the site. No speech was made during the brief ceremony.
Netanyahu met with Celine Shreki, who had been among the hostages there and who told him about what transpired during the attack.
At the end of the visit, the Prime Minister told reporters, “A direct line leads between the attacks of extremist Islam around the world to the attack that took place here at a kosher supermarket in the heart of Paris. I expect all of the leaders, with whom we marched in the streets of Paris yesterday, to fight terrorism wherever it is, also when it is directed against Israel and Jews. Insofar as it depends on me, I will always see to it that Israel marches in the first row of nations vis-à-vis its security and its future.”
Earlier Monday, Netanyahu met with the leaders of the French Jewish community in his Paris hotel. The Prime Minister thanked the leaders of the community for their warm hospitality and for the moving night at the Grande Synagogue in the city’s center, where a memorial service was held for the four Jews killed in the attack kosher supermarket this past Friday.
Ahead of the meeting, the prime minister said, “If the world doesn’t unite against terror, the plague of terror that we saw here will increase in a way people cannot imagine. Therefore I hope that Europe will unite and see the reality as it is. Israel supports Europe in its struggle against terror, and the time has come for Europe to support Israel in the very same struggle.”
Netanyahu also met with former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who’s likely to run in the next presidential elections scheduled for 2017.
During his visit to Paris, Netanyahu thanked Lassana Bathily, a Muslim employee at the Paris supermarket, who hid several customers in a walk-in freezer during the siege of Friday.
According to his own account of the story, as gunman Amedy Coulibaly entered the Jewish supermarket, Bathily told a few customers, including one holding a baby, to hide inside a walk-in freezer in the basement. He switched off the cooling system, locked them inside and told them to stay calm.
