Occupied Jerusalem: An anonymous US official’s reported description of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “chickens***”, or worthless coward, drew a sharp response on Wednesday from the Israeli leader - no stranger to acrimony with the Obama administration.

The American broadside, in an interview in The Atlantic magazine, followed a month of heated exchanges between the Netanyahu government and Washington over colony building in Israeli-annexed occupied East Jerusalem, which Palestinians seek as the capital of a future state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickens***,” the unidentified official was quoted as saying, using Netanyahu’s nickname and a slang insult certain to redden the ears of the US-educated former commando.

“The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars,” the official said, in apparent reference to past hints of possible Israeli military action against Iran’s nuclear programme. “The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states.” Netanyahu, the official was reported to have said, is interested only in “protecting himself from political defeat ...

He’s got no guts.” Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog sounded a more critical note, telling Channel Two television: “Netanyahu is acting like a political pyromaniac, and he has brought our relations with the United States to an unprecedented low.” In a series of recent speeches widely seen in Israel as setting the stage for a possible poll, Netanyahu has highlighted growing security concerns in the wake of the July-August war with Hamas in Gaza and regional unrest that has brought Islamist militants to Israel’s northern border with Syria.

Israel also worries that US-led world powers will agree to what it deems insufficient curbs on the nuclear programme of its arch-foe, Iran, in talks with a looming November 24 deadline.

Fears of a possible new Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, have been stoked in Israel by now-daily rock-throwing by Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem amid Muslim fears of an end to an Israeli de facto ban on Jewish worship at Al Haram Al Sharif.