U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is meeting Wednesday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as he continues to try to calm a wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

The talks in Ramallah follow Ban’s meeting Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during which the U.N. chief spoke of the danger of allowing an escalation “into a full religious conflict with potential regional implications.”

Ban told reporters that “security measures can be counterproductive if they are applied without special efforts to defuse the situation before people lose their lives.”

Israeli security forces have faced accusations of excessive force against Palestinians during the weeks of violence that have left at least eight Israelis and more than 40 Palestinians dead. 

Ban also said Tuesday he remains deeply troubled by Hamas and Islamic Jihad praising Palestinian attacks against Israeli Jews, and expressed his concern over the “inflammatory rhetoric” to President Abbas.

Netanyahu, in turn, accused Abbas of sparking the current wave of terror against Israel by joining Islamic State and Hamas in claims that Israel is threatening to take over the east Jerusalem holy site known to Muslims as the al-Aqsa mosque and to Jews as the Temple Mount. 

“We vigorously protect holy sites, we keep the status quo,” Netanyahu said.  “It is the Palestinians who violate the status quo by bringing explosives into the Temple Mount and stopping Jews from visiting.”

Under long-standing arrangements, Islamic religious authorities administer al-Aqsa.  Israel allows Jews to visit but not pray in the compound in Jerusalem’s walled Old City, which it captured along with other parts of east Jerusalem and the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who spent weeks shuttling between Israeli and Palestinian leaders before peace talks collapsed last year, also plans to hold his own discussions this week in hopes of calming the situation.
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