Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu vowed on Monday that if reelected he will build thousands more Jewish homes in Jerusalem and prevent future concessions to the Palestinians in the capital.

Speaking ahead of Tuesday’s general election on a whistlestop tour of the Har Homa neighborhood in southern Jerusalem, Netanyahu vowed he would never allow the Palestinian Authority to reestablish the Arab occupation of the city.  

“I won’t let that happen. My friends and I in Likud will preserve the unity of Jerusalem,” he said of his ruling party, vowing to prevent any future division of the city by building thousands of new Jewish homes.

“We will continue to build in Jerusalem, we will add thousands of housing units, and in the face of all the (international) pressure, we will persist and continue to develop our eternal capital,” he added.

Israel reunited Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War, after much of it had been occupied by the Jordanian Arab Legion.

The Palestinian Authority has been demanding what they call “East Jerusalem” – really the majority of the city including southern and northern neighborhoods like Har Homa – as the capital of a Palestinian Arab state.

Ahead of tomorrow’s elections, Netanyahu has been trying to rally right-wing voters around him, urging supporters of other nationalist parties to vote for the Likud and making similarly strong statements about construction in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

With Netanyahu’s Likud trailing the left-wing Zionist Union in the last opinion polls before the vote, Netanyahu ramped up the rhetoric against its leaders Isaac “Buji” Herzog and Tzipi Livni, warning that a vote for them would endanger Israel’s security.

“If Tzipi and Buji set up the next government, Hamastan 2 will be established on these hills here,” he said, pointing to the surrounding landscape.  

“We are preventing it (by) developing prestigious neighborhoods here for tens of thousands of Israelis,” he said.

In contrast, echoing his warning in an Arutz Sheva interview yesterday, Netanyahu said Livni and Herzog would give in to international pressure to split the city and even expel Jewish residents from their homes to make way for an Arab-only state.

“They will give in… and the meaning of this is that we won’t be able to preserve Israel’s security, and the terror that worked against us before will fire missiles at us from these hills.”

AFP contributed to this report.