Algemeiner recaps PMW report: "Fatah depicts unity with Hamas as deal between two terror organizations"

Militant Fatah and Hamas fighters featured on Fatah's Facebook page. Photo: PMW.

Cutting to the core of Israel’s objection to a return of armed militants to party politics, the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah Party posted a photo to its Facebook page featuring masked fighters from its Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and Hamas’s Izz A-Din Al-Qassam Brigades wielding machine guns.

Headlined, “Yes to unity and to ending the rift,” the Facebook post,translated by Palestinian Media Watchon Wednesday, showed how Fatah, in the green headband, and Hamas, in the yellow, present themselves to their supporters — as terrorist fighters, which is what both the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and the Izz A-Din Al-Qassam Brigades are recognized as internationally.

The photo featured the quote: “Men’s shoulders were created only to carry rifles. Either we will be mighty above the earth, or we will be bones in it.”

Another photo on Fatah’s Facebook page showed, in the forefront, a fighter veiled in a headscarf and holding a rifle, and, off to the right, a dagger and a knife and Israeli soldiers being struck by lightning.

The caption read, “We will not surrender; we will win or die.” Beside the armed struggle, the other message Fatah portrayed was calling for unity against the common enemy.

A poem posted on the Fatah Facebook page read:

“Not a member of Hamas, not of Fatah, not of the [Popular] Front [for the Liberation of Palestine], not of the [Islamic] Jihad: For in the enemies’ eyes, we are all ‘Anwar’ (stereotypical Arab name) / And our face is the face of the brown-skinned Fatah man / The face of Yasser [Arafat] (Fatah), the face of Ahmed [Yassin] (Hamas), and the face of [Fathi] Shaqaqi (Islamic Jihad) who never wavered, and of Abu Ali Mustafa (PFLP), the red rebel.”