JERUSALEM, Israel — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the Palestinian Authority leadership Sunday of denying the fact that Hamas murdered hundreds of civilians at a music festival on October 7 — just as Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas had denied the Holocaust.
In a video statement in English, Netanyahu said:
Today, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah said something utterly preposterous. It denied that it was Hamas that carried out the horrible massacre at the nature festival near Gaza. It actually accused Israel of carrying out that massacre. This is a complete reversal of truth.
Abu Mazen [Abbas], who in the past has denied the existence of the Holocaust, today is denying the existence of the Hamas massacre and that’s unacceptable.
My goal is that the day after we destroy Hamas, any future civil administration in Gaza does not deny the massacre, does not educate its children to become terrorists, does not pay for terrorists and does not tell its children that their ultimate goal in life is to see the destruction and dissolution of the State of Israel. That’s not acceptable and that is not the way to achieve peace.
The context was a claim by the Palestinian Authority that Israeli helicopters killed people at the music festival near Re’im:
The Palestinian claim, in turn, was based on an article in Israel’s left-wing daily Ha’aretz that claimed Hamas made the decision to attack the music festival spontaneously rather than plotting the attack in advance.
Ample video footage shows Palestinian terrorists murdering festival-goers in their cars, in open fields, in bomb shelters, and even in portable toilets. Some 260 people were murdered, and many taken hostage.
As Breitbart News recently noted, Abbas has a personal history of Holocaust denial, going back to his Soviet doctoral thesis, which attempted to minimize the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis.
Netanyahu has said that Israel will oppose any role for the Palestinian Authority in governing Gaza after the war because of its policies of encouraging and subsidizing terror.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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