JERUSALEM – A 17-year-old terrorist who was shot and killed earlier this year while throwing Molotov cocktails at Israelis is a “martyr and bird in Paradise,” a Palestinian Authority official told his family.
News of the visit by Laila Ghannam, the District Governor of Ramallah and El-Bireh, to the family of Muhammad Hattab came as Muslim rioters in Jerusalem lobbed Molotov cocktails at police officers on Tuesday night in protest of increased security measures at the Temple Mount following the murder of two Druze-Israeli policemen by Arabs at the holy site last Friday.
According to official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Ghannam decided to visit the families of the young terrorists who would have been graduating high school this year had they not chosen to “martyr” themselves by attacking Israelis.
Ghannam presented the Hattab family with a statuette of a bird, telling them: “Our child Martyrs, Allah willing, are birds in Paradise.”
The Ramallah governor glorified the dead terrorist with a pun on the word shahada, which is Arabic for “martyrdom” as well as the term used for the certification of matriculation upon finishing high school. She told the family that instead of receiving his shahada from high school this summer, Mohammed was “achieving the highest shahada” in heaven, according to a translation of the report by Palestinian Media Watch.
This year, the Ramallah governor “expressed her pride” over the “generations that are loyal to the path, and wished success to all of the high school graduates.”
Hattab was killed in March by Israeli soldiers while throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli civilians at the entrance to the Jewish settlement of Beit El near Ramallah.