Jonathan Pollard
Jonathan PollardYehuda Glick

A senior member of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's entourage to New York revealed to Arutz Sheva that Netanyahu intends to raise Jonathan Pollard's release in his meeting with US President Barack Obama on Wednesday.

Netanyahu is in New York for the UN General Assembly, which he addressed on Sunday. In meeting Obama, the source told Arutz Sheva that he will discuss the fate of Pollard, now in his 29th year of incarceration in an American cell on charges of spying for Israel.

"Prime Minister Netanyahu intends to raise the topic of Pollard in his meeting with the US president and to request his release, as has been done previous times," the source relayed.

It has been charged that the unprecedented lengthy jail term for Pollard, charged for spying for an ally nation and who last month turned 60 behind bars while suffering from health issues, crosses the lines into anti-Semitism.

According to the source, aside from Pollard other topics of discussion are to include the danger of Iran gaining a nuclear weapon, and Israel's demands that the Islamic regime not be given concessions on its nuclear program.

The source also rebutted the White House's criticism of Netanyahu's comparison between the terrorist organizations Islamic State (ISIS) and Hamas in his UN speech.

"Hamas and ISIS are two sources with similar ambitions branching from the same poisonous tree, and just as the US isn't considering to arm ISIS, weapons must not be allowed into the hands of Hamas and Iran," the source said. "They all have similar ambitions, dangerous not only to Israel but to the whole world."

However, the source added that Netanyahu's omission of the topic of Palestinian statehood in his speech did not indicate a change in his policy to negotiate such a state.

Indeed the prime minister has been engaged in a covert building freeze for Jews in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem in recent months in what some have charged as being an effort to build facts on the ground for a Palestinian state. 

Netanyahu will meet on Tuesday with representatives of the Jewish Federations of North America, and later with the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and speak to world media.