Palestinian Authority hides knife attack, calls Israel “1948 territories,” and blames Israel for Arab crime

In one article, the official Palestinian Authority news agency, WAFA, did three things at once: It hid a Palestinian knife attack, denied Israel's existence by calling Lod part of the "1948 territories," and exploited Arab-sector crime statistics to incriminate Israel for violence it did not commit.

Headline: "Israeli police kill young man in Lod"

"A young Palestinian man, identified as Sami Ahmed Ja'sous, in his twenties, was killed on Wednesday after being shot by Israeli police in the city of Lod inside the territories of 1948 (i.e., PA euphemism for Israel).

This marks the sixth person killed by police in the city since the beginning of the year.

The killing comes amid increasing reports of excessive force by Israeli police in Arab towns inside the 1948 territories, with repeated calls for transparent and independent investigations into such incidents.

Arab communities inside Israel have also witnessed a rise in violence and homicide cases in recent years, including shootings and stabbings. Earlier on Wednesday, two separate incidents in Basma and Shfaram left two more young men dead, bringing the total number of killings since the beginning of the year to 139."

[WAFA, official PA news agency, English edition, July 1, 2026]

WAFA reported that "Israeli police kill young man in Lod," presenting the incident entirely as a case of police violence against Arabs in Israel. WAFA, however, omitted the central fact that Sami Ahmed Ja'sous was carrying a knife, ignored police orders to stop, ran toward officers, and attempted to stab them before he was shot. This also followed a woman's call to the police emergency line to report that Ja'sous was holding a knife near the Lod municipality area.

By completely omitting anything about the knife and attempted stabbing, WAFA transformed a violent attack on officers into a story of an innocent "young Palestinian man" killed by Israel. This is a frequent PA libel technique: remove the Palestinian violence, preserve only the Israeli response, and then present Israel as the aggressor.

WAFA also twice described Lod as being "inside the territories of 1948," which is Palestinian terminology used to avoid saying "Israel," thereby denying Israel's legitimacy within any borders. Lod is an Israeli city inside the internationally recognized State of Israel, but WAFA's wording presents all of Israel as "occupied" Palestinian land from 1948, the year of modern Israel's establishment.

Finally, WAFA misleadingly connected the police shooting to the broader crisis of violence in Arab towns, citing shootings and stabbings in Basma and Shfar'am and the reported total of 139 killings since the beginning of the year. However, those figures refer not to police shootings but to internal Arab-sector violence, primarily between gangs, as well as to interfamily feuds—some of which have been going on for decades, and even to so-called honor killings. By placing Arab-on-Arab crime immediately after the Lod incident, the PA news agency insinuated Israeli responsibility for unrelated criminal violence within Arab communities.

Palestinian Media Watch reported just a month ago that the PA regularly portrays Arab-sector murders as an Israeli "conspiracy" and even "directed" by Israel. This WAFA article follows the same script and goes even further, again showing how the PA has made a policy of pinning the blame on Israel for every internal Palestinian and Israeli-Arab problem.