The New York Times reports: JERUSALEM — In an effort to appeal to Palestinians ahead of hotly contested elections, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas listed one of its main achievements as having “killed 11,000 Israelis.”
The party, Fatah, made the incendiary claim on Tuesday in an Arabic-language post on one of its official Facebook pages.
“For the argumentative … the ignorant … And for those who do not know history,” begins the Facebook post, “The Fatah movement killed 11,000 Israelis.”
Fatah also claimed to have “offered 170,000 martyrs,” and hundreds of its followers, it said, were in “Israeli occupation jails.” By Thursday the post had been shared 30 times and liked 163 times.
The post garnered additional attention after it was translated into English by Palestinian Media Watch, an organization that monitors anti-Israel and anti-Semitic statements in the Arab news media. The website noted that it was the second time Fatah had made the inaccurate claim. The first was in August 2014.
Israelis and Palestinians have long accused each other of incitement to violence. But in Israeli eyes, Palestinian leaders starting with Yasir Arafat, the father of Palestinian nationalism who helped found Fatah in 1959, have had a habit of saying one thing in Arabic and another in English.
Read more here.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.