Israeli election challenger sorry for Arab deaths in 2000

In this file photo taken on June 26, 2019, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak gives a press conference at Beit Sokolov in Tel Aviv on June 26, 2019. (AFP)

• Ehud Barak said that “there is no place for protesters to be killed by their country’s security forces.”

JERUSALEM: Israeli election contender and ex-Premier Ehud Barak apologized Tuesday for the killing of Israeli Arabs in bloody 2000 protests, after an Arab lawmaker slammed him in a newspaper editorial.
Barak, who hopes to topple incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, held the post himself in 2000 when security forces killed 13 people when protests marking the annual “Land Day” turned violent.
Land Day commemorates the killing of six Israeli Arabs in 1976 protests over government confiscation of their land.
Israeli Arab lawmaker Esawi Frej wrote in the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper Tuesday that Barak must apologize and take responsibility for the deaths.
Earlier this month Frej, of the opposition Meretz party, ruled out an alliance with Barak’s Israel Democratic Party in the September general election because of the 2000 killings.
“Esawi Frej wrote important words that come from a place of pain,” Barak told Israeli public radio on Tuesday.
“They are important and painful things. I take responsibility for everything good and bad that happened during my tenure as prime minister, including the events in October 2000 in which 12 Israeli Arabs and a Palestinian from Gaza were killed.”
“I am once again expressing my regret and apology before the families,” he said.
Israel’s Arab minority — who number more than 1.3 million — are the descendants of Palestinians who stayed on their land when the state of Israel was established in 1948. They comprise about 17.5 percent of Israel’s population.