Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Photo: Jonathan Klinger via Wikimedia Commons.

A “war of legal attrition” is currently being waged against Israel by foreign entities, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Thursday, according to Israeli media reports.

Lieberman told lawmakers that the Defense Ministry was at present dealing with 260 petitions to the High Court of Justice — “110 of them against Jewish settlement [in the West Bank] and another 150 by Palestinians against the state of Israel regarding illegal construction and all sorts of other things…This hurts the normal functioning of the Defense Ministry’s legal department and the ministry as a whole. We’re simply not equipped to deal with this, in terms of resources and manpower.”

Furthermore, he noted, “There is no doubt most of these petitions are primarily meant to harass and badger the system.”

According to Lieberman, “International entities, funded from abroad, some by European nations,” were responsible for the situation.

At the same committee meeting on Thursday, Lieberman said Israel was doing “what is necessary” to prevent Syria from funneling advanced military equipment and weapons of mass destruction to the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist organization, based in Lebanon and operating in Syria on behalf of the Assad regime.