A senior Fatah leader this week said that he and the movement “bless and encourage” Palestinian killers of Israelis in the recent wave of terror attacks, exalting the terrorists as “heroes and a crown on the head of every Palestinian”.
Speaking on the anniversary of the launch of the Fatah movement, Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee Jibril Rajoub said: “Yesterday in Hebron, they escorted 17 Martyrs to burial. This is of course a source of pride for all of us. I say that whoever carried out individual acts of heroism, we in the Fatah movement bless and encourage them. We consider them heroes and a crown on the head of every Palestinian”.
Rajoub continued: “At this point, when there is weakening and frustration, there is a group of people, beginning with our brother Muhannad Halabi and ending with the last Martyr… There is a competition between individuals. This is one of the issues we need to address – are we for or against it? I say that we in the [Fatah] Central Committee have discussed this matter, and we are in favour”.
The terrorist mentioned by Rajoub, Muhannad Halabi, was responsible for the murder of two Israeli civilians in a stabbing attack in Jerusalem in early October 2015, killing two men and injured two others, including a two-year-old.
Rajoub had previously branded the terror attacks against Israelis as “heroic” and praised individual attacks as acts of noble self-sacrifice, in an interview on official PA TV in October: “Clearly, these are individual attacks, but they are heroic, characterized by self-control and a value system”.
Since October 2015, a wave of violence against Israelis has been fomented by repeated inflammatory false allegations from the Palestinian Authority, Fatah and Hamas accusing Israel of planning to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque and other Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. Leading Palestinian officials have endorsed the terror attacks, and Palestinian social media circulated numerous images and videos calling for further violence.
