An Israeli drone strike on Monday eliminated five terrorists, a terror operations room, and a warehouse full of explosives near the Palestinian Authority city of Tulkarm.
Or: Israel shelled a “refugee camp,” slaughtering “five civilians, including two teenagers” in an act of wanton aggression.
The first version of the story is what actually happened. The second is the Palestinian Authority’s make-believe version, as published by the official PA news agency Wafa.
Why is it that in the World According to the PA, there are no Arab terrorists, they have no weapons depots or bomb factories, and they never attack innocent Israelis?
The answer may be found in a careful look at this week’s incident near Tulkarm. It offers a fascinating study in how the PA revises news in order to incite the Palestinian Arab public to hate Jews and Israel.
Let’s start with the location of the Israeli strike. According to the PA, it was “the Nur Shams refugee camp” near Tulkarm. The term “refugee camp” means that it’s inhabited by refugees. Nur Shams isn’t inhabited by genuine refugees. The last time refugees moved there was during the 1948 war. Only a small number of residents are older than 76 (the average life expectancy in the PA areas is 76.5); but the overwhelming majority of the population is younger than that. And even those who are older didn’t necessarily flee to Nur Shams from some other place.
The reason that they are all called “refugees” is because the UN’s definition of “Palestinian refugees” includes anybody who is a descendant of an actual refugee. That’s like calling most American Jews “refugees” because their great-grandparents fled from pogroms in Czarist Russia. The absurd UN definition is parroted by the mass media, and by those partisans and pundits who deliberately inflate the number of “Palestinian refugees” to gain sympathy.
The term “refugee camp” conjures up images of people living in tents or, at best, shacks. Google images of Nur Shams, and you’ll see that it consists of large, modern apartment buildings. It looks like any other Palestinian Arab town. They have electricity, running water—and lots of terrorists.
One of them was Jibril Jibril, a 20 year-old Hamas terrorist. He was set free in last November’s deal for some of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. According to Israeli media reports, Jibril immediately returned to his terrorist ways and took part in several attempted murders of Jews. He was one of the five eliminated in Monday’s drone strike.
The Israeli government released a photo of Jibril in full military attire, brandishing an automatic weapon. But how did the PA’s news agency portray him? Wafa circulated a photo of him in civilian clothes, with a baseball cap and sunglasses.
The other four terrorists killed in the strike were in a strategic operations room in the home of Abu Shuja’a, leader of Islamic Jihad in Tulkarm, and in an adjacent warehouse full of explosives.
Not according to the PA, however. The Wafa report stated only that the barbaric Israelis “targeted a house in the al-Manshiya neighborhood in the Nur Shams camp.” In the PA’s fun house mirror-reality, Zionist savages go around bombing innocent people’s houses for no apparent reason.
When terrorists are on the run, we imagine that they are hiding in attics or caves or similar places. But not in Nur Shams. The terrorists there are not on the run at all. The head of Islamic Jihad has his own house, with a terror operations room. Next door, he has a warehouse full of bombs.
That’s yet another reminder that the PA security forces could arrest these terrorists and shut down their warehouses in five minutes—if they wanted to. But they don’t want to. Because the PA considers the terrorists its brothers, not its enemies.
That’s a blatant violation of the Oslo Accords, which require the PA to arrest and disarm terrorists, shut down their weapons depots and bomb factories, and outlaw terrorist groups. (Annex I, Article II, 3-c of Oslo II).
Instead of fulfilling its Oslo obligation, the PA shelters terrorists, pays salaries to terrorists and their families, and teaches Palestinian Arab children to idolize terrorists and follow in their footsteps.
The Palestinian Authority’s See No Terrorists / Hear No Terrorists / Speak of No Terrorists policy make it impossible for any reasonable person to conclude that the Palestinian Arab leadership has any real interest in peace.
(Moshe Phillips is National Chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.)