Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Monday that the Itamar terror attack was a despicable, immoral, and inhuman act.
"A human being is not capable of something like that," Abbas said in an interview with Israel Radio on Monday. "Scenes like these - the murder of infants and children and a woman slaughtered - cause any person endowed with humanity to hurt and to cry."
Abbas added that the Palestinian Authority would have prevented the attack, in which five members of the Fogel family were stabbed to death by two Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank settlement of Itamar, if it would have had prior information about it. He noted that he agreed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to launch a joint investigation into the matter.
He said that he does not expect a wave of terror attacks in the immediate future and stressed that he will not allow it.
He also rejected Netanyahu's previous comments that the PA incites against Israel in its mosques, and called to set up an Israeli-Palestinian-American committee to examine Netanyahu's allegations that there is incitement in Palestinian textbooks in schools.
Following the attack, Netanyahu had repeatedly called on the Palestinians to explicitly condemn the murder in Itamar, expressing dissatisfaction at the PA's immediate statements condemning violence.
On Sunday, Israel responded to the terror attack by approving 400 housing units in the West Bank settlements, a move which brought harsh criticism from both the Palestinians and the United States.