Occupied Jerusalem: Three Palestinian MPs from the Israeli regime’s parliament who met relatives of Palestinians killed after allegedly carrying out attacks on Israelis were under fire from both sides of the country’s political divide on Friday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he wanted to punish the three lawmakers while the opposition Zionist Union said the meeting “gave a helping hand to terror.”

“Members of Knesset (parliament) who go to comfort the families of terrorists who murdered Israelis do not deserve to be in the Israeli Knesset,” Netanyahu said in a statement late on Thursday.

“I have asked the speaker of the Knesset and the attorney general to examine what steps can be taken against them,” he said.

MPs Basel Ghattas, Jamal Zahalka and Hanin Zuabi attended a meeting initiated by a Palestinian committee seeking to retrieve the corpses of attackers killed at the scene by Israeli security forces, their Balad party said.

A wave of violence since October has killed 164 Palestinians, 26 Israelis, as well as an American and an Eritrean, according to an AFP count.

The Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces, most while carrying out attacks mostly against Israeli occupation forces, but others during clashes and demonstrations.

Israel has returned the bodies of some attackers but is retaining others, a move decried by Palestinians as intended to punish the families of the assailants.

Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan says he wants to avoid funerals becoming political rallies, although Palestinians say withholding the bodies are a form of collective punishment.

“The non-delivery of the bodies is an act of revenge” against attackers’ families, Balad said in a Friday statement.

Adalah, a Palestinian rights group inside the Green Line, said relatives of a number of Palestinians killed in attacks took part in the meeting with the MPs, but it did not elaborate.

A Balad statement said that among those present was the father of Bahaa Alyan, who in October boarded a bus in Jerusalem with a friend Bilal Ganem, and shot and stabbed passengers, killing three people.

Ganem was arrested and Alyan was killed.

The meeting provoked outrage across the Israeli political establishment.

Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon, of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, said that the Balad lawmakers represented a “small and separatist minority among Israeli Arabs.”

“The radical minority that is trying to incite and divide must be condemned and removed from our midst,” he said.

Lawmaker Itzik Shmuli, of the main opposition Zionist Union said that his party “totally condemned” such contacts.

“It’s an act that simply gives a helping hand to terrorism,” he told Israeli public radio on Friday.

“It encourages attacks against innocent Israeli citizens.”