Fatah takes to Facebook to celebrate murders of over 100 Israelis
Two posts on consecutive days highlight ‘outstanding operations’ in history of Abbas’s movement and during Second Intifada
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement used social media this month to celebrate numerous attacks by its members that killed over 100 Israelis.
Israeli monitoring group Palestinian Media Watch found that the Fatah used Facebook on two consecutive days to highlight its “most outstanding” terror attacks, in which a total of 116 Israelis — 100 civilians, including 22 children, and 16 soldiers — were killed.
According to PMW, the first post lauded Fatah’s “10 most outstanding operations” in the group’s 52 year history. The second post highlighted the “10 most outstanding operations in the Al-Aqsa [Second] Intifada” — a reference to the wave of violence and terrorism that lasted from 2000 to 2005 and claimed over a thousand Israeli lives.
The attacks were classed as “outstanding” in some cases due to the high death toll they incurred, such as a 1978 bus hijacking that killed 37 people. Others were included for their historical significance to Fatah, such as the first terrorist attack to target civilians — a 1965 bombing in which no one was actually hurt.
PMW said the post praising the attacks since Fatah’s creation was to taken down shortly after it was published, and showed a map of Palestine that included the whole of Israel as well as the Palestinian territories. It also depicted Fatah’s logo, which contains images of a grenade and guns, and a list of the so-called “outstanding operations.”
Abbas has renounced the use of violence in the Palestinian cause, although in January one of his aides caused outrage when he called for gruesome attacks against Israelis.
Sultan Abu al-Einein, an adviser to Abbas on civil society organizations and a Fatah Central Committee member, said during an interview with the Palestinian news site Donia al-Watan: “Wherever you find an Israeli, slit his throat.”
