Netanyahu asks France to keep high security at Jewish sites

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked France Friday to maintain tight security at Jewish sites after a series of incidents that included four hostages being killed at a kosher store in Paris.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu asked the president of France to keep up the increased security on Jewish institutions even after things return to normal,” Israeli government sources said following a telephone conversation between Netanyahu and Francois Hollande.

“Our hearts are with the families of the victims. Israel offers you any help that France may need,” the sources quoted Netanyahu as saying.

Netanyahu called for the international community to unite in the fight against Islamist terror. He said Islamic extremism has to be tackled, too, at its sources of funding, and also that its incitement efforts needs to be tackled and thwarted.

Earlier, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said Israel was following with concern what he called the “terror offensive” in France.

“The terrorist offensive taking place over the past three days is not only against the French people or France’s Jews but against the entire free world,” Liberman’s spokesman quoted him as saying.

“This is another attempt by the forces of darkness of extremist Islam to impose fear and terror on the West, and the entire international community must stand determinedly as a bulwark against this terror,” said Liberman.

French elite forces stormed two hostage sites Friday, killing two brothers behind Wednesday’s Charlie Hebdo massacre and a third jihadist ally who stormed the kosher supermarket in an incident that claimed the lives of four hostages and left several more seriously injured.

During an address to the French nation Friday evening, Hollande said the hostage crisis at the kosher grocery store in Paris was an “appalling anti-Semitic act.”

“Those who committed these acts have nothing to do with the Muslim religion,” he said.

Earlier Friday, while the attacks were still ongoing, Netanyahu convened an emergency consultation with top officials, and offered intelligence and other assistance to France.

The panel, which included Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Mossad chief Tamir Pardo, among others, was advised to continue providing the French authorities with as much intelligence as possible and to refresh safety guidelines at the Israeli embassy in Paris and Jewish institutions throughout the country.

“This is the essence of the battle that we’re fighting. The terrorists have shown that they have the will to crush us, but they don’t have the capacity,” Netanyahu tweeted on the Prime Minister of Israel’s Twitter account.

“Now we must show that we have the will to defeat them and crush them. It must be followed by a broad-based assault on the forces of radical Islam throughout the world. This is everybody’s battle,” he said.

The prime minister asserted that the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine on Wednesday and the Friday attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris were a microcosm of a greater battle against jihadists.

“This is a global struggle. Bringing to justice the Paris murderers is just the beginning,” he wrote. “And all of them seek to destroy our freedoms and to impose on all of us a violent, medieval tyranny. They might have different names, but all of them are driven by the same hatred and blood-thirsty fanaticism.”

“They bomb churches in Iraq; they slaughter tourists in Bali; they rocket civilians from Gaza; and strive to build nuclear weapons in Iran…we have to fight these enemies of our common civilization,” the prime minister added.

Netanyahu, invoking the jihadist terrorism Israel has grappled with, said that he sympathized with France and once again sent his condolences to Hollande and the French people.

“We grieve with our French brothers & sisters. We reaffirm our commitment to work together to defeat the enemies of the democratic values,” concluded Netanyahu.

The prime minister had sent a condolence letter to Hollande Thursday, expressing empathy over the deadly terror attack at the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

“This attack on France is an attack on us all. Free peoples everywhere must unite to confront radical Islamist terrorism and to protect ourselves against this threat to our common civilization,” Netanyahu wrote to his French counterpart.

On Wednesday, gunmen stormed the Paris office of the magazine, claiming a dozen lives, including prominent Jewish cartoonist Georges Wolinski.

Charlie Hebdo, which regularly runs articles and caricatures critical of religion, has published a series of satirical cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.