The head of Israel’s Foreign Ministry asked Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday to remove a new monument to a Palestinian who killed 15 people and wounded 77 others in a 1975 terrorist attack in central Jerusalem.

In a video message, Dore Gold blasted the PA’s decision to honor Ahmed Jabara, also known as Abu Sukkar, who detonated a refrigerator filled with five kilograms of explosives in Zion Square. Fatah, the party led by Abbas, claimed responsibility for the attack.

“The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has taken the man who perpetrated that attack, whose name is Abu Sukkar, and they built a monument to honor him,” Gold said in the video. “That’s the education that the Palestinian Authority wants to give to Palestinian children. The way it is now we’re not going to be able to get very far in any kind of negotiation. Because negotiation requires a culture of peace and not a culture of death.”

Gold expressed hope that Abbas, who heads both the PA and Fatah, would “tear down” the monument.

The monument was dedicated in a ceremony attended by several PA officials earlier this week, despite a request from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for Abbas to cancel the event. “Rather than dedicate a statue to a mass-murderer, I ask that you consider honoring a champion of co-existence,” Netanyahu said in a video message to the Palestinian leader last week. In the same video, he called on Abbas to stop paying salaries to terrorists and to negotiate a peace deal with Israel.

Jabarah was released from prison in 2003 as a goodwill gesture by the Israeli government to Yasser Arafat, and was subsequently made a PA adviser on prisoner affairs. He expressed no remorse for his crime. At the time of his death three years ago, he was buried with full PA military honors and eulogized by Abbas as a “pure soul.”

[Photo: Ramallah & al-bireh Governorate محافظة رام الله والبيرة / Facebook ]