Last week, a Palestinian NGO organised a tree planting ceremony honouring 209 “Martyrs of the popular uprising”, including a number of terrorists who carried out recent violent attacks against Israelis, leaving 34 dead and over 400 wounded since September 2015.
The NGO, Union of Agricultural Work Committees, is funded by a number of foreign governments and international organisations, including UNRWA, UNDP and the governments of Australia and Spain among others.
Included the honourees was 19-year-old terrorist Muhannad Halabi, who murdered two Israelis last year.
On 3rd October 2015, Halabi stabbed 2 Israeli citizens to death, Rabbi Nehemiah Lavi (a father of seven) and Aharon Bennett (a father of two), in the Old City of Jerusalem. He also attacked Bennett’s wife, Adele, and their 2-year-old son, who suffered moderate injuries.
Halabi has been previously honoured by the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, with a main road between the West Bank towns of Birzeit and Ramallah named after him as well as the posthumous honorary law degree awarded to him by the PA Bar Association.
A table tennis tournament was held in his honour in December 2015, sponsored by Fatah Central Committee member Jibril Rajoub.
Another UN-funded Palestinian NGO, Rural Women’s Development Society, organised a chain of readers last month to commemorate terrorist Baha Alyan, who together with another Palestinian murdered three Israeli civilians on a bus in Jerusalem last year.
The chain of readers involved women reading books about the Palestinian national culture, as Alyan himself had organised chains of readers in 2014 around Jerusalem.
Similar chains of readers were organised elsewhere in the Palestinian Territories, including at Hebron University, Birzeit University and Al-Quds University.
Glorification of terrorists in the Palestinian Authority has been widely documented, and many have accused the PA of encouraging children to carry attacks against Israelis through this incitement.
