Jordanian royal court has denied as "utterly baseless" remarks attributed on Friday to King Abdullah II by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. "What some Israeli newspapers quoted the king to have said during his meeting on Thursday with the Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Dalia Itzik, is completely baseless," said Amjad Adayleh, the head of the Media Department at the royal court on Saturday. "The quotations carried by Haaretz represented a clear offence to Jordan and its leadership as well as a distortion of the sincere efforts the Kingdom has been leading in defense of the Palestinian people's rights," the spokesman said.
Haaretz, quoting Israeli lawmakers, said King Abdullah had assured Itzik that the solution provided for in the Arab peace plan for the Palestinian refugee problem could take the form of paying only "compensations" to the Palestinians who "deserted their homes when Israel was founded in 1948." The compensations could be paid by rich Arab countries; the Israeli paper further claimed the monarch as saying. |