Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoned Jordan's King Abdullah II on Thursday and extended his condolences to him and the Jordanian people following Islamic State's grisly murder of captive Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh.
Netanyahu said that all civilized people were “shocked by this barbaric cruelty, which the world must fight.”
This is the first time the two have spoken since they met in Amman in November, together with US Secretary of State John Kerry, at the height of tension surrounding the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
It is unlikely the Prime Minister's Office would have released a read-out of the call without the approval of the Royal Palace in Jordan which, apparently, had no qualms about the call being made public even on a day when the country's pilots were carrying out sorties against Islamic State positions in Syria.
In Thursday's conversation, Netanyahu noted the importance of the “joint commitment to maintaining the status quo at the holy sites.”
He also noted the importance of Jordan's decision earlier this week to send back to Israel its ambassador, Walid Obeidat, recalled in November.
On Wednesday Netanyahu drew parallels between the killing of Kaseasbeh and Iran.
“In the Islamic State of ISIS, they burn people alive; in the Islamic State of Tehran, they hang them from cranes in the public squares,” he said. “Both are motivated by an extreme ideology of militant Islamic terrorism that has a cruelty that is unbounded.”