TEL AVIV – The Palestinian Authority’s official newspaper on Sunday ran an article claiming that Israel and the U.S. were behind Friday’s terror attack on a mosque in northern Sinai in which 305 were killed.
Writing in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul said “the U.S., Israel and their pawns” were responsible for the “shocking and bloody massacre” whose goal was to “weaken Egypt.”
The column, which was translated by watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch, said that Israel was attempting to “reenact the massacre at the Ibrahimi Mosque (i.e., the Cave of the Patriarchs) that was committed by Zionist settler Baruch Goldstein on Feb. 25, 1994.”
It further claimed that the U.S. and Israel have devised a plot to break up Egypt into tiny statelets.
They do not want Egypt – the symbol of Arabness – to rise, recover, and restore to itself its leading pan-Arab role. The US, Israel, and their pawns know well that the resurrection of Egypt means the resurrection of all the peoples of the Arab nation, and therefore the colonial need dictates keeping Egypt in a state of political, security, economic and social exhaustion.
There is an American-Israeli decision – which is being implemented by their pawns … to continue weakening Egypt, at least, particularly because the main goal of their plan is to tear unified Egypt into small and scattered states.
Last month, Muhammad Al-Soudi, a member of the PLO’s political bureau, made similar accusations in the same paper following the death of six Egyptian soldiers in an attack.
Terror in the Sinai region, Al-Soudi claimed, “is sustained by the aggressive forces in the region and prime among them the Zionist enemy, which is focused on taking apart the Arab nation, its states and its capabilities.”
The paper has also ran opeds claiming that Israel was responsible for terror attacks in Jordan as well as the Paris attacks in November 2015.