JERUSALEM – Just before the arrival of senior Middle East advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt in the region to advance a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority named a square after the terrorist mastermind behind the murder of 22 children.
The newly inaugurated “Martyr Khaled Nazzal Square” in the West Bank city of Jenin is named after the terror leader who planned the 1974 attack known as the Ma’alot Massacre in which 26 people, including 22 children, were killed.
The inauguration event of the square was attended by PA officials, members of the Jenin municipality and the local branch of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Speaking at the inauguration event, Deputy Mayor of Jenin Mahmoud Abu Mweis “emphasized that our leadership and our people will continue on the path of the Martyrs,” according to an article on an independent PA news website translated by Palestinian Media Watch.
The text on the monument to the terrorist Nazzal reads:
Martyr Khaled Nazzal Square
We must guard the flowers of the Martyrs (quote from a song by Palestinian Authority poet Mahmoud Darwish)
1948-1986, for a free Palestine
Khaled Nazzal, who served as the the Secretary of the Central Committee of the DFLP and commander of its military branch, planned the Ma’alot attack, which involved a two-day hostage situation with 115 schoolchildren and their teachers, ending in the murder of 26.
That same year, Nazzal planned an attack which resulted in the murder of four hostages in an apartment in Beit She’an. A decade later, in 1984, Nazzal masterminded a shooting and grenade attack in central Jerusalem in which one person was murdered and 47 others were wounded.