PA Daily column blames Israel for the murder of Palestinians
Excerpt of a column by Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul, regular columnist for official PA daily and former advisor to former PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on national affairs
Headline: “Stand against them with wisdom and willpower”
“It is urgent now to write about the state of social dread and panic that has spread throughout the Palestinian public following the culture of cowardly murder cases committed by the gangs of [Israeli] undercover forces, mafias, hashish and drug dealers, and collaborators – the tools of the Israeli security forces. The Palestinian civilian (i.e., Israeli Arab) in the Galilee, the Triangle, the Negev, and the mixed [Jewish-Arab] cities (i.e., all located in Israel) wonders to himself at every moment now while at home, in the street, at work, or in his car: Who is the next victim? He no longer feels security for himself, his wife, his children, his sisters, his village members, his village, or his city due to the increase in the barbaric murder cases, which the Israeli ethnic cleansing state stands behind in a crazy manner, to the point that the number of victims has reached more than 130 since the start of the year [2023].
The cases of death and organized crime committed by the Israeli security forces among the Arab Palestinians has doubled in a clear and obvious decision by the successive Israeli governments, and foremost among them the fascist triumvirate government [of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir – Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich] – a government that has given a free hand to all its tools to commit cheap and cowardly acts of murder in order to achieve the goal of willingly expelling the Palestinian civilians from their cities and villages. This, or at the very least to make them live in a state of sick fear and dread, disrupt the economic cycle in the Palestinian cities, paralyze political, culture, artistic, and academic life, and kill the Palestinian civilians through the disease of fear that has begun to enter the Palestinian cities and villages, and particularly Nazareth, Shfar’am, Umm Al-Fahm, Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, Lod, Ramle, Sakhnin, and others…
This has deepened the crisis of the Arab Palestinians inside the Zionist apartheid state and helped the fascist government and its security forces to expand and deepen the acts of killing and murder among the Palestinians and to expel them into the homes, in their workplaces, and wherever they go. This is because when they escape to the option of non-confrontation and defeat against the barbarity of Israeli crime or submission to the lies of the Netanyahu government and its secondary committee to deal with the acts of murder among the Arab Palestinians, which was composed led by the head of the gang of killing and terror, they become easy prey that can be killed one after the other, while [the Israeli government] uses lies and misleading reports and falsifies the facts. This is because it [the Israeli government] is the one that is funding, arming, and giving a free hand to the criminal murderers to do as they please with the [Palestinian] people’s blood, and it is defending them from prosecution and being put on trial… The fear and dread create more fear, and this helps the spread of crime, because this option strengthens the confidence in the souls of the undercover forces’ murderers and criminals.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 5, 2023]
Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul is also a former PLO Central Council member.
Al-Ghoul wrote this after months of internal strife among Israeli Arabs had led to 139 killings.