Israeli Leaders Defiant as Paris Victims Buried in Jerusalem

Tuesday, January 13, 2015 | Israel Today Staff

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Israeli leaders sounded a defiant tone on Tuesday as four Jewish victims of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris were laid to rest in Jerusalem.

Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab and Francois-Michel Saada were all killed during after a Muslim gunman stormed a Jewish grocery store and held shoppers and staff hostage, just days after fellow jihadists massacred employees at the offices of a satirical magazine in the French capital.

The bodes of the four victims of the grocery store attack were flown to Israel along with their families.

Their funeral at Jerusalem’s Har HaMenuchot cemetery was attended by President Reuven Rivlin, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, opposition leader Isaac Herzog and many other political and military leaders.

“This is not how we wanted to welcome you to Israel,” Rivlin said, looking to the bereaved families. “I stand before you, brokenhearted, shaken and in pain, and with me stands an entire nation. …This is sheer hatred of Jews; abhorrent, dark and premeditated, which seeks to strike, wherever there is Jewish life.”

Netanyahu vowed that no matter how dark the present situation, the terrorists “will never, ever beat us. This is the strength of an ancient people that has always prevailed and thank God, look around you, here in the mountains of Jerusalem, today we have a state of our own, flourishing and advanced, a state that is a moral beacon to the world.”

Herzog said there was a direct connection between the hatred that brought about the Paris supermarket attack, and the spilling of Jewish blood in Israel.

“A straight line connects the murder of the four Jews [in the Paris supermarket] to the bastards who penetrated the Har Nof synagogue and killed people at worship in their prayer shawls two months ago,” the opposition leader stated.

Herzog echoed Netanyahu in insisting that “terror will not win. …This is what brings the Jewish people together: the fact that we are set apart from other nations, the fact we face enemies.”

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Tuesday, January 13, 2015