07-Oct-19: How hard is it to produce 12 year old knife-attackers?

We don''t claim to be 100% sure but a social media post [here]

suggests this is the stabber described in our post.

The world-class treatment he's getting is courtesy of

Shaarei Zedek Medical Center and the government of Israel

With a current news item in mind, here's some insight into how the Palestinian Authority's policy of child weaponization works.

We wrote here a week and a half ago ["27-Sep-19: Weaponized Palestinian Arab children and more Arab-on-Israel stabbings"] about an on-duty female member of the Israel Police being injured in the course of a frenzied stabbing attack launched by a Palestinian Arab boy of thirteen. We were wrong: he was twelve. And it's evident he didn't intend to inflict mild trauma. He was very likely intent on killing.

The boy apppeared in court yesterday.

12-year-old indicted for Jerusalem attack in which officer was lightly injured | Boy charged with terror offenses for attempting to stab police officers in Old City last month; female officer was lightly hurt when barrier fell on her hand during scuffle | Times of Israel | 6 October 2019 | The Jerusalem district attorney on Sunday indicted a 12-year-old boy under terror laws for the attempted stabbing of a policewoman in Jerusalem’s Old City last month.
According to the indictment, on September 26, the day of the attack, the minor attended prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. At the conclusion of prayers, he allegedly walked up to a group of female officers at the Temple Mount’s Chain Gate, above the Western Wall area, pulled out a knife and attempted to stab the officers. During the ensuing scuffle, a female officer, age 34, was lightly injured when a security barrier fell on her hand. According to the indictment, a staff member of the Waqf, the Muslim trust that oversees the site, tried to catch the boy and keep the police from him.
The boy was overpowered at the scene and arrested.
The boy is accused of committing an act of terror in which he unlawfully attempted to injure a person with a knife for religious and national motive. Prosecutors asked that the boy remain detained until the end of legal proceedings.

There's no indication whether the Waqf worker who tried to prevent the police from taking the stabber into custody will face criminal or terror charges. If he's not, that's disturbing.

Here's some of the background that put the boy in the photo above into, first, an Israeli hospital bed and then Israel's juvenile criminal justice system where he's now fated to spend some of what should have been his best years.

First, let's understand the meaning of Waqf, an Arabic term defined [Wikipedia] as "confinement and prohibition" or causing a thing to stop or stand still. In the legal sense, it is said to mean the detention of a specific thing for purposes of "charity of poors [sic] or other good objects".

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan imposed a waqf on Jerusalem after the invasion by its British-led army, and the subsequent two-decade long massively-destructive conquest and occupation, of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the wake of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.

After East Jerusalem was liberated in the course of the June 1967 Six-Day War, Israel - for pragmatic reasons related to its desire for neighborly relations and respect for Muslim sensibilities - allowed the waqf to re-assert its authority over the Temple Mount, which happens to be Judaism's holiest site.

Jordan's King Abdullah II "currently supplies all of the funding needed to operate the waqf." But as a recent analysis of changes in its structure shows, ["New Waqf Council Managing the Temple Mount", JCPA - Nadav Shragai, Lenny Ben-David | February 28, 2019], the Waqf is poised to do more harm:

The main, most dramatic change in the composition of the Waqf... was the joining of Sheikh Akram Sabri, currently chairman of the Supreme Muslim Council and former Mufti of Jerusalem. Sabri is now identified with the Muslim Brotherhood’s “the northern faction of the Islamic Movement” in Israel, and he follows the orders of Turkey and its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Some also believe that he is close to Hamas. At the beginning of the second intifada, Sabri identified with suicide bombings, and he is known for his extreme pronouncements against Israel... Other new members of the Jordanian Waqf, who Jordan agreed to allow into the new council after it was expanded from 11 members to 18 are mainly affiliated with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority... Until the establishment of the new Waqf, most of its members were pro-Jordanian. Its new composition expresses a united front [among] the Palestinian Authority, Fatah, and people like Sheikh Akram Sabri – and anyone who fears for Jordan’s future status on the Temple Mount. It is a joint coalition against the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.

The weaponization of Palestinian Arab children by the kleptocratic/geriatric Mahmoud Abbas regime that rules them is the result of several concurrent strategies that have been implemented for years by now:

• Large long-term monthly payments to prisoners and the families of dead terrorists by the Palestinian Authority, funded from a deficit budget that is replenished via foreign aid grants to the PA. These Pay-to-Slay payments as they are comminly termed grow with the seriousness of the terror offense. 
• Overt, explicit incitement to more acts of terror by the Palestinian Authority and by terror groups
• The recruiting and training of children to engage in conflict: Special mention to the United Nations UNRWA people responsible these past seven decades for nurturing, preserving, perpetuating and legitimizing the violent discontent of Palestinian Arab schookl children.
• The systematic glorification of Arab-on-Israeli violence throughout Palestinian Arab society
• The deliberate, ideology-driven abandonment of weaponized Palestinian Arab children by the numerous child-protection agencies that raise billions each year on the profoundly dishonest premise that, like DCI Palestine, they are "committed to securing a just and viable future for Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory".

With all these in place, getting to the results they want are not that challenging.

Israel attracts serious criticism for its treatment of child offenders. In large measure, this is dishonest, politically-spun and based on poorly understood data. For instance, as a respected human rights organization based in Israel reported in February 2018 [NGO Monitor] in an essay that contradicts some of what "everyone knows" about Israel's "failures":

• Some 90,000 children aged between 10 and 17 were arrested in England and Wales between April 2015 and March 2016, an average of about 7,500 per month. Adjust these numbers for population and you can make this highly relevant comparison - that minors are arrested in England and Wales (where armed conflict is not currently a major feature of life) 5.5 times more often than Palestinian Arab minors living in the so-called West Bank are.
• In data covering the years since since 2013 (a period of considerable Arab-on-Israeli violence and the massive Arab promotion of terror), the number of Palestinian Arab minors arrested annually in areas under Israeli control was between 800 and 1,000. 
• Of these arrested, how many were subjected to prosecution? About 450-505. Thus on average, in a population of roughly a million minors (quoting Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics data), fewer than 85 such minors are arrested each month and fewer than half of those are prosecuted.
• And this: International law and Article 66 of the Fourth Geneva Convention mandates that Israel must establish military courts as part of its obligation to “take all the measures in [its] power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.” Moreover, Israel's law and enforcement practices meet all the requirements of “due process,” the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Article 68 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The rules of evidence applied by the Military Courts are the same as the rules of evidence applied in the Israeli domestic criminal justice system.

These are not points that the chorus of child-weaponizers and their foreign-government-funders, backers and advocates want us to know.

Nor do they advertise the single most important take-away we can think of: that, given Pal Arab society's massive ongoing investment, it is dead easy to weaponize pre-teen Palestinian Arab boys and girls and turn them into killers.

16-Aug-19: Children with knives and another Arab-on-Israeli stabbing frenzy

Photo montage from an online source [here] shows the stabbers

as depicted today in the social media and via security cam footage

In the latest such attack, two Palestinian Arab children armed with knives ["Cop injured in Jerusalem stabbing attack; 2 assailants shot", Times of Israel, August 15, 2019] were stopped from killing their Israeli targets on Thursday.

Both are minors. At least one is 14 years old. Some reports, but not all, say the other is too.

Two teenage assailants stabbed a police officer, moderately injuring him, in an apparent terror attack in Jerusalem’s Old City on Thursday, officials said. The assailants were shot by security forces at the scene. One of them was pronounced dead at the scene, the second was critically wounded and taken to the hospital, a police spokesperson said.
Graphic video footage from the scene showed the two teenagers walk up from behind a group of police officers stationed in the Old City. As they approached, they suddenly pulled out knives and began repeatedly stabbing one of the cops. Other officers at the scene opened fire at the pair as they were stabbing the victim.
The injured police officer was approximately 40 years old. He sustained multiple stab wounds to the upper body, medics said.
“We gave him medical care, including stopping the bleeding and bandaging him, and we took him to the hospital,” one of the medics on the scene said. The officer was taken to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center.

Via social media [click to view], there's high quality graphic security cam video of the actual attack and of the quick and focused response by the Israeli security personnel.

The location is said to be the Old City's Chain Gate. It's one of the dozen open gates (though sometimes closed) that lead to the Temple Mount and is limited, in accordance with current Israeli security measures, to Muslim worshipers and visitors only. In Arabic, they call it Kubat A Silsila.

Shortly after the attack [Image Source]

Haaretz names the 14 year old knifer as Hamuda Khader a-Sheikh who is being treated for his wounds, and a 17 year old (in their version) they name as Nassim Abu Rumi who is said to have died at the scene. (In its report, Ynet says the dead attacker was also fourteen.)

Both evidently, though not confirmed, are from Al-Azaria, a village on the slopes of Jerusalem's Mount of Olives. It's better known to some as the Biblical town of Bethany, the home of Lazarus (hence its Arabic name).

Arab reports include wide-ranging claims that deny and distort:

• Eyewitnesses refuted the IDF's allegations and confirmed that there was no stabbing. They explained that a settler tried to storm the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and when the guards tried to stop him, he opened fire on the guard's foot... [Sabaharabi, Egypt]
• The police opened fire on two citizens at the Gate of Chains [in the Old City] from the outside, then announced the martyrdom of one of them. The injury of the other is described as medium. An Al Aqsa guard was shot in the foot. [Arabic edition of Ma'an News, Bethlehem]
• The Zionist media reported that a cop was injured by two Palestinian stabbers who attacked him in occupied Al-Quds (Jerusalem). The Israeli occupation troops shot directly at the two youths, injuring both of them, and closes the gates of Al-Aqsa Mosque, according to Palestinian sources. [Al-Manar, Lebanon]
• Video shows the pair approaching a group of Border Police officers and then lunging at them. The officers immediately open fire on the boys, and do not appear to attempt to subdue them with nonlethal means [from the especially loathsome propaganda mill of Electronic Intifada].
• From a Gaza-based Arab reporter: "2 palestinian kids got murdered by israeli occupation fire in occupied Jerusalem after allegedly stabbing operation #BDS" [Twitter account with more than 6,000 followers]

Source

How Palestinian Arab society weaponizes its children and encourages stabbing attacks in particular has troubled us for years. 

It's a chronic form of incitement that starts at the highest levels of the Palestinian Arab power structure: click for indexed articles.

Three years ago we wrote about how there is no way of avoiding the reality of large swathes of Palestinian Arab society being in the obvious thrall of a passionate embrace of vicious bigotry, murderous savagery and explicit incitement of their own children and grandchildren to murder and to be killed.

Two outside actors deserve a special mention in this grotesquerie:

• The central role of UNRWA, ostensibly an agency that exists to ameliorate the suffering of Arab refugees (Palestinian Arab refugees to be more precise) but in reality a cornerstone of the seven-decades-long Arab strategy to keep the Palestinian Arabs displaced, as miserable as possible and in the news - ought to be acknowledged at this point. By their own reckoning, they play a huge role in the education of Palestinian Arab children. They are certainly part of the problem and not of the solution.
• Amnesty International's increasingly explicit identification with the practitioners of the Palestinian Arab brand of terror makes plain their abandonment of principle and betrayal of their supporters' values. As we have noted several times [most recently here: "20-Sep-16: Another Pal Arab boy with a knife died today - exactly as the PA intended him to"], there's no longer anything to expect from them.

More than 80 of our blog posts have the tag "Weaponizing Children". This would be an excellent time to re-acquaint ourselves with the betrayal of, and the outrages perpetrated on, the children of Palestinian Arab society by those responsible for their well-being.

It's a reality that's difficult to deny or ignore though plenty of reporters and their editors nonetheless do just that.

27-Dec-18: What's changed these past 15 years with the maleducation in Palestinian Arabs schools?

One of the most distressing and depressing aspects of how the Abbas and Hamas regimes weaponize their Palestinian Arab society's children is in how they educate them.

The evidence for the open and callous manipulation of their children's minds and futures has been out there for anyone concerned with the truth to absorb. Yet its corrosiveness goes on. And no less disturbing, it continues in large measure to be funded by non-Arab states in the name of "helping".

We're reposting here an article written by Arnold Roth for the Wall Street Journal back in September 2003 - more than a decade and a half ago.

Readers paying attention will see that, while some things have changed somewhat, others remain just as rotten as they were back then.

Blood, Money and Education
Arnold Roth / The Wall Street Journal Europe
September 26, 2003

JERUSALEM -- The European Commission is abuzz with financial scandals involving significant sums and the EU's statistical agency. They pale, however, compared with the consequences and scale of EU mismanagement in an area that affects my family and me.

Last December, I traveled to Brussels as a member of a small contingent of Israelis. Each of us had experienced the loss of a family member by terrorism in the past two years. My daughter, Malka Chana, 15, was killed by a Hamas terrorist cell. She was a high school student, a talented musician, a volunteer passionately dedicated to the care of disabled children. When her murderer exploded himself in a Jerusalem restaurant in August 2001, he massacred 15 innocent civilians, mainly children and teenagers. Hundreds were injured.

Chris Patten, the EU's Commissioner for External Relations, plays a central role in the provision of EU financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. I intended to ask him in that visit whether he was aware of evidence that EU money, channeled through his office to the PA and so necessary to improving Palestinian lives, was being diverted to fund terrorism. Did he believe a just peace could be achieved when teachers paid from EU grants to UNRWA (U.N. Relief and Works Agency) teach Palestinian children that Israel has no right to exist and that their martyrdom is a glorious part of the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East?

Unlike the other senior EU figures we approached, Mr. Patten declined to meet us. We met his deputy instead.

I referred him to evidence uncovered by Israeli forces in 2002 showing that the PA's top managers skim money off the payroll and that secret bank accounts are a routine part of corruption in the PA. My concerns were misplaced, he said, since all payments made via Mr. Patten's office to the PA are closely supervised by the International Monetary Fund. Immediately after our meeting, I checked the record and learned that some months before, the IMF had published a report denying this. The IMF report confirmed budgetary abuse by the PA.

Earlier this month, my family and I again lost friends to terrorism. One of the victims of another massacre in a Jerusalem cafe was an emergency room doctor, David Appelbaum, who had dedicated his life to caring for terror victims -- Jews and Arabs alike. His daughter, killed with him, was to be married the next evening.

Their tragic murders led me to reflect again on what it would take to stop the hate-filled education of Palestinian children that turns them into walking grenades.

Checking the EU's Web site, I found a Dutch MEP had just asked some questions to Mr. Patten on this theme. Mr. Patten's written answer said that the Commission "has no evidence of Community funding to the Palestinian Authority being misused for anything other than its agreed purpose. Should such evidence come to light, immediate action would be taken."

This was strikingly similar to his response to charges about the misuse of EU money by the PA. The refrain was repeated after Human Rights Watch's report into Palestinian terrorism noted that "The al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades appear to have benefited from the routine misuse of PA funds."

Some 55% of all Palestinian Arabs are under the age of 20. Addressing their needs is critical to the building of bridges of peace between our two peoples. Around 3.5 billion euros in the form of EU aid reached the Palestinian leadership between 1994 and 2001. Wherever it went, it has failed to benefit their education or bring peace. The hateful messages that permeate their education, including EU-funded textbooks, guarantee another generation incapable of reconciling itself to peace with Israelis. In fact, there is internal Palestinian correspondence verifying that Hamas has taken control of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, ensuring the children continue to be taught to admire and emulate suicide bombers.

Mr. Patten promised immediate action when concrete evidence comes to light. I have now written to him, pointing to two specific sources.

First, the San Francisco Chronicle, in an interview last week with Mahmoud Abbas, the PA prime minister who just resigned, quotes him as confirming what Israeli documents proved 18 months ago: that the PA's top managers skim money off the payroll and that secret bank accounts are routine.

The story quoted Mr. Abbas as saying that Arafat blocked financial reforms because they threatened illegal slush funds Arafat was using to pay for the intifada. PA officials' salaries are paid by the EU, "but Arafat or his cronies were skimming off up to 15% in income taxes and using it for their own causes," said the story.

It then quoted Mr. Abbas as saying "Personally, I don't know where those funds go. When we wanted to cancel them, they said: `You're harming the intifada'."

A second source is a report on the Palestinian economy released last week by the IMF. This reveals that $900 million was "diverted" by Arafat from tax receipts alone over the past several years. Most of it possibly ended up in Palestinian public assets. But the IMF adds that not all the missing money can be accounted for and points to additional specific problems in internal PA budget control practices. Published Israeli military intelligence reports said exactly this last year. Mr. Patten dismissed them.

The Commission has stubbornly denied the existence of such corruption even while serving as one of its principal feeders. Innocents like my daughter die because money is available to lubricate the wheels of evil and corruption and for hate-filled education.

My letter reminds Mr. Patten that the EU-sponsored road map demands an immediate end to Palestinian terrorism. He can choose to exercise the funding power already in his control, and condition future PA grants on unambiguous prior evidence that Palestinian education has become peace-directed and positive. Or he can continue denying the price of EU blood money.

* * *

Click to go to "Snouts and troughs"

Chris Patten, better known today to those who respect and appreciate him as Baron Patten of Barnes, CH, PC, went on at the conclusion of his European Commission gig to to become Chancellor of the University of Oxford and then Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation. He resigned (on grounds of ill-health) in 2014. He never troubled himself to reply to our expose or to the letters mentioned in the WSJ article.

For a little additional colour and background, please take a look at some related past posts of ours:

• 6-Oct-06: Crying poor: The terror-laden rise and rise of the Palestinian national payroll and the men who allow it to happen
• 9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs
• 28-Mar-14: Once more: European double-talk on the funding of Palestinian Arab terrorism
• 09-Jan-18: Money, deception and terror: Israel is taking some concrete steps

04-Oct-18: Entitlement, transparency and foreign aid: Responding to Parents Circle

From this week's Australian Jewish News

We were bothered by views that appear in a recent report ["Fears funding freeze is going too far", Nathan Jeffay, September 20, 2018] that looks at changes in the Trump administration's approach to US support for non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The parts that jumped out at us had to do with a group on which we have expressed ourselves at intervals over the years without getting much response: Parents Circle Families Forum.

They appear in the article's opening lines

Donald Trump is being accused of taking his squeeze on Palestinian funding too far, by stopping new grants to organisations that promote coexistence with Israelis. “It’s totally heartbreaking,” said Robi Damelin, an Israeli bereaved mother who runs a coexistence group with bereaved Palestinian parents. She was talking to The AJN shortly after hearing that the Trump administration is cutting its last major aid channel to Palestinians, namely $US10 million annual funding to projects like hers which bring together Israeli and Palestinian civilians... 

Then a few paragraphs later:

Damelin said that America is acting dangerously by undermining coexistence work as a strategy to achieve political results. “It can only achieve more violence,” she said. Her son David was killed when a terrorist opened fire at an IDF roadblock in the West Bank in 2002, and she became involved in The Parents Circle Families Forum, a grassroots organisation of Palestinian and Israeli families who have suffered a bereavement due to the conflict. She believes that groups like hers are building connections between populations which will prove vital if there is to be a political agreement. “Can they imagine that there could be peace without contact between Israelis and Palestinians? ” she asked rhetorically. “This will cause fear of the unknown, which leads to hatred and its natural partner, violence.”

Each of us (Frimet and Arnold) has criticized PCFF's work and methods via articles and posts over a period of 15 years. Other than a degree of vituperation, we haven't gotten meaningful responses from them in all that time which we assume is a strategy. 

Arnold wrote a brief comment for the Australian Jewish News which they published yesterday in their print edition. If an online version gets published, we will add the details in an update to this post. So far, there's none.

Reflections on the dark side of foreign aid 

Arnold Roth, Jerusalem | Published in the print edition of the Australian Jewish News, October 3, 2018

Nathan Jeffay’s review of US foreign aid cuts ["Fears funding freeze is going too far", September 20, 2018] touches on some of the undoubtedly thorny questions that arise when long-standing funding commitments are suddenly slashed.

I have no role in any organization that benefits from US (or any non-Israeli) government funding. And I surely don’t have the responsibility of either defending or attacking what the Trump Administration chooses to do.

But like many observers of Palestinian Arab and Israeli societies and their universe of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), I strongly favour transparency, along with critical, frequent and active reassessments of who gets funded by foreign governments. In other words, management that has goals and results in mind.

If programs are found to need changing, let the change come.

UNRWA, the startlingly unique “refugee” organization, has sought since the late 1940s to perpetuate – but not to solve – the powerlessness and misery of Palestinian Arabs. Anyone familiar with its operations, especially its schooling, understands how much harm flows from institutionalized hypocrisy, embedded ideology - and inertia.

Right at the outset, Jeffay’s article quotes one of the central figures in Parents Circle Families Forum (PCFF). Robi Damelin and I have spoken on the same platforms in the past. My wife and I have written critical opinion pieces about PCFF’s work. In Israel’s large circle of families bereaved by acts of Arab terror, it’s a small, marginal and noisy participant.

Ms Damelin, reacting to an announced change to US funding that will affect PCFF, tells Jeffay it’s “totally heartbreaking… undermining coexistence work as a strategy to achieve political results… It can only achieve more violence.”  

That’s an overblown, self-aggrandizing response. But more than that: as Frimet and I have written in several opinion columns over the years, it reflects an approach we know is offensive to many of Israel’s thousands of terror-affected families. We have been one of those since our daughter Malki was murdered in the 2001 Hamas attack on a Jerusalem pizzeria.

PCFF’s fund-raising emphasizes that it brings together the families of terror victims from among Palestinian Arabs and Israelis who “have chosen a path to reconciliation”. 

But its calls for change address just one side. Israelis are the aggressors. Palestinian Arabs are the victims and powerless to change much in their lives and society. The occupation is at the heart of the conflict. And terrorism – is simply missing from the narrative. 

They concede their line is unrepresentative of Israel’s bereaved families. Nonetheless it has stayed dismayingly consistent throughout the 15 years we have observed them. How is this offensive?

PCFF likes to say its work constitutes “an alternative to hatred and revenge”. The realization sank in some years ago that the hatred and revenge for which they have “an alternative” are what they tell the world the rest of us Israelis feel. It’s repugnant and it’s also untrue. Their messages adopt the language of bereavement. But their substance is skewed to the political. In my view, it’s calibrated to meet the political expectations of funders.

(Pointing out the sharp divergence between what claim to do and the reality is beyond the scope of this short comment. The blog Frimet and I write [meaning ThisOngoingWar, which you are probably reading now] has more: click here)

Everyone ought to be free to promote their own political view of the conflict. Though I find it offensive, PCFF are entitled to exploit bereavement to raise funds and to promote specific ideological positions.  

They don’t owe me or anyone else an accounting – except their funders. Funders can embrace or reject that approach. 

Let PCFF do whatever they feel needs to be done. But it’s absurd for them to argue that they are entitled to US government funding. If their work produces an acceptable return on investment, however that’s defined, funders will seek them out. The broader issue though is about how large bodies, often controlled by governments, use sometimes-vast aid funds to influence and even change the political landscape in other countries.

Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor is mentioned in Jeffay’s article. I play a tiny committee-member’s role there that gives me some insight into the distortions and the double standards that are often part of the funding industry. A notorious illustration: the Abbas regime’s rewards-for-terror stipends scheme has produced a devastating harvest of deaths and blighted lives on both sides since Arafat’s time.

The PA has for all practical purposes been insolvent through all those years. Those stipends and that hideous scheme are made possible only by foreign funding. Let it be critically reviewed widely, often, transparently and with vigour.

If you care to review (and of course to respond to) the critiques we have offered of PCFF and its approach, here are some:

• 27-Nov-02: The sin of forgivenness fervor, Frimet Roth in Jerusalem Post [archived]
• 12-Jul-13: Behind the facade at Parents Circle, messages that are deeply disturbing to bereaved families
• 17-Oct-13: Naive in Seattle (but not only there, of course): notes from the battlefield
• 27-Jun-14: First, understand the war and the grief | A response to Parents Circle
• 23-Oct-16: Vengeance is ours, say these Israeli Jews

09-Jan-18: Money, deception and terror: Israel is taking some concrete steps

Image Source: "The Palestinian Dream"

Over at the Jerusalem Post this afternoon, there's an important summary of information placed before the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee this afternoon ["Palestinian Authority paid terrorists nearly $350 million in 2017", Lahav Harkov, January 9, 2018].

If you're not already familiar with them, the data are simply eye-popping. In a society where the average income is about US$580 per month, the PA regime headed by Mahmoud Abbas gives that sort of money to anyone sentenced by the Israeli court system to three to five years in prison.

But since serious terrorist offences often come with sentences stiffer than 3-5, it's worth understanding what those offenders get paid by their perennially-broke government and what other benefits they can expect to get.

• A terrorist sentenced to 20 years or more in prison is paid five times the average salary. It starts to flow while he or she is still in prison. And it then keeps coming - for the rest of the recipient's life. Does anyone think there might be some subtle message here about where the PA and Abbas are placing the emphasis in the vision they offer their citizens?
• Then the fine print: If the imprisoned terrorist holds Israeli citizenship (there were about 1.8 million such Arabs in 2017 according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, meaning they represent 20.8% of Israel's total population), then they qualify for a US$145 bonus.
• The sum paid each month by the PA for what the article calls "the most severe crimes" exceeds US$2,900 which is larger than the average Israeli income (currently about US$2,700 per month according to the article and about US$2,955 according to another source). 
• Being married gets a terrorist a further increment, and there are add-ons for each child parented by the convicted terrorist.
• There are also specific pay increases for (a) being married and (b) each child a terrorist parents.
• If and when the terrorist beneficiary of all this largess gets out of prison, the PA law entitles him or her to a prestigious civil service post in its government

And as we observed not long ago ["25-Jul-17: The scale of the PA's terror-funding scheme keeps growing"], it's all getting worse, not better. 

At various times, advocates for the Palestinian Arabs contend that this is nothing more than social welfare and the Israelis are making a big deal out of nothing. But that's not so: the fact that you get more money according to the severity of the crime and/or the length of the sentence means that the payments are there to encourage serious crime - the more serious the better. And as Palestinian Media Watch has pointed out, the PA defines the entitlement to these payments in terms that ensure PA salaries do not go to Palestinian Arabs convicted of crimes such as theft - who may very well be social welfare cases - but do go to terrorist murderers in the service of Hamas and Fatah. Further elaboration is really not needed: anyone taking a dispassionate look at the realities knows the PA scheme has one clear purpose, and it's not the alleviation of poverty.

From a recent US summary of the scheme's impact:

The PA spent an estimated $300 million last year, roughly seven percent of its total budget, on these payments to more than 30,000 terrorists and their families. It does so at the direct expense of helping provide a better future for its own citizens, and despite its heavy dependence on foreign aid for income. Much of that aid comes from the United States - an average of $335 million annually over the last five years. The lion’s share, roughly $280 million per year in that span, is economic assistance to cover the PA’s significant debts, freeing up funds for their “pay-to-slay” system. The issue has not gone unnoticed by Congress. ["Passing the Taylor Force Act will mark a vital step in the War on Terror", TheHill.com, November 15, 2017]

We also noticed. See "08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look". And before that, we had posted dozens of reports and analyses [click here for more of them.)

The report delivered today to Israel's parliament, the Knesset, is part of the current efforts to create a new law that will deduct the total of what the PA pays its terrorists and their families from the taxes Israel collects and until now has handed across to the PA. There's more money at stake there than most people would guess. A July 2016 Reuters report estimated the scale of Israel-to-PA transfers at between US$130 and US$155 million per month. Translating this to annual figures, it's something between US$1.5 and US$1.9 billion.

The new Israeli bill, says the Jerusalem Post, "will likely go to the Ministerial Committee for Legislation in three weeks, with a first reading in the Knesset in the ensuing days". It's said to be largely inspired by the Taylor Force Act, a United States law that will stop all US aid to the Palestinian Arabs as long as the PA keeps paying salaries to terrorists and their families. (Our take:
"11-Jul-17: Incitement to terror: Sometimes it really is all about the money") The House of Representatives passed the bill in December 2017. It's now awaiting Senate approval.

The US is of course not the only state giving aid to the Abbas regime. Others include [according to this source] UNRWA and the EU through the European Commission [see "02-Jun-15: The obvious, petty lies that keep European money flowing into the hands of the PA's terrorists"], Japan, Canada, Norway [see "02-May-16: Norway's polite and cautious funding of Palestinian Arab terror"], Germany, Sweden, Spain, France and the United Kingdom [see "14-Jun-16: In the UK, law-makers (some) worry over the bloodshed funded by their taxpayers"].

The deep and corrosive damage on Arab lives and on ours depends on the unquestioning passivity of ordinary tax-payers of (mainly) Europe and North America, leading us to ask some years ago: "20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?" 

It also depends on much less innocent, faceless government bureaucrats who silently and with little-to-no publicity (especially to their own citizens) sign the wire transfers behind closed doors and pay next to no attention to how those funds are spent or what's done with them. Darkness, secrecy and deception [see "6-Oct-06: Crying poor: The terror-laden rise and rise of the Palestinian national payroll and the men who allow it to happen"] have been part of the whole story pretty much from the outset.

14-Dec-17: Understanding what happened after Wednesday night's Gazan rocket attack on Israel

Haaretz says (rather blandly) three rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip toward Israel yesterday (Wednesday): 

Two were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system and one fell into an open area as alarm sirens sounded in southern Israeli districts and cities including Sderot. Magen David Adom emergency responders said that a 30-year-old man wounded his leg while running for cover, and two others were being treated for shock. The rocket fire on Israel from the Gaza Strip Wednesday evening is returning the residents of the Gaza border region back to a state of tension they haven’t experienced since Operation Protective Edge over three years ago. No less [sic] than 15 rockets have been fired into Israeli territory since U.S. President Donald Trump’s declaration on Jerusalem, and although the Israel Defense Forces has been showing restraint, it will have a hard time holding back for much longer. 

Others say there were four, not three, and the difference points to something significant:

On Wednesday night, four rockets were fired from Gaza at southern Israel. Two of them were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system, a third struck an open field and the fourth fell short of the border and hit a school in the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli officials... [Times of Israel, today]

So that's five Arab-on-Israeli attack rockets intercepted in mid-air and brought down by the amazing, life-saving, defensive Iron Dome system so far this week. 

As far as we know, neither Haaretz nor any non-Israeli news source has drawn attention to how yet-another Fell Short rocket dispatched on its murderous path towards Israel failed to cross the border and fell onto the heads of hapless Gazan Palestinian Arabs.

This time it struck a school according to Israeli assessments:

Beit Hanoun’s Ghazi al-Shawa public school, according to Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the Defense Ministry liaison with the Palestinians.

Given the late-night hour, it was probably empty of students. But who really knows? And just imagine the reaction if it was an Israeli attack that view up a Gazan (almost certainly meaning UNRWA) school. Does anyone think The Guardian (which has a documented interest in Gazan schools being attacked) will give its readers any insight into this latest school bombing.

Fell Shorts are never reported by the terrorist regime in Gaza. If they did, they might have to own up to the utter contempt they have for harming their own side. Fell Shorts are very rarely reported by major news agencies.

By way of response, Israel this morning (Thursday) imposed a closure of its Gaza crossings:

Israel announced the closure of its Gaza border crossings on Thursday in response to daily rocket fire from the enclave over the past week after US President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital stoked Palestinian anger. [Reuters, this morning]

An Israeli source adds:

The army said the Kerem Shalom Crossing, from which goods enter and leave the Strip, as well as the pedestrian Erez Crossing would be shuttered beginning on Thursday, in light of “security events and in accordance with security assessments.” It was not clear when the crossings would reopen, the army said. A military spokesperson said that in “humanitarian cases” Gaza residents may be allowed to pass through the Erez Crossing, but that this would be contingent upon approval from Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, Israel’s chief military liaison to the Palestinians, known formally as the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT). [Times of Israel, today]

CNN's reporting on this ["Israel closes Gaza border crossings", CNN, today - archived here in case they change the text] maintains CNN's not-exactly-stellar record for perspective and fairness:

The Israeli military said it will close border crossings into Gaza beginning Thursday until further notice "due to the security events and in accordance with security assessments."
The crossings being closed, Kerem Shalom and Erez, are the only two on the Israeli border left. Israel has closed border crossings when tensions are high, some which have not been reopened to date. The territory is also under a naval blockade by the Israeli navy. Kerem Shalom is the crossing point where goods and supplies are brought into Gaza; Erez is the point where people cross. Shutting the two points effectively cuts off Gaza from the rest of the world by land, save for its small Egyptian border, which is generally closed. The territory is also under a naval blockade by the Israeli navy.

(Yes, Israel's navy gets mentioned twice. There's something about sailors in uniform.)

CNN has an interesting way of looking at this. Gaza, which everyone knows views Israel as its sworn enemy and which is busily attacking Israelis with rockets and tunnels at this moment, is shut off "from the rest of the world" by Israel closing its border this morning. Oh, "save for its small Egyptian border" which is "generally closed".

The word agitprop was invented for silliness of this CNN sort.

25-Jul-17: The scale of the PA's terror-funding scheme keeps growing

Abbas [Image Source: AP]

Someone has done some useful number-crunching to give up-to-date and stats-based proportion to the Palestinian Authority's blood-soaked Rewards for Terror scheme.

A paper published online yesterday, ["Palestinian Payments to Incarcerated Terrorists and Martyrs’ Families Rise in 2017", Yossi Kuperwasser - JCPA Institute for Contemporary Affairs, July 24, 2017] analyzes the PA's detailed budget for 2017.

Naturally, the "usual allocations for salaries to imprisoned and released terrorists" are there. So are the so-called "martyr" payments. They get transferred to the families of Palestinian Arabs killed or injured in what the PA disingenuously calls the “struggle against Zionism” - in reality, the decades-long Palestinian Arab terror campaign against Israelis and Jews.

How does the Palestinian Authority's economics management track record look when compared with say Israel's. Catastrophically might not be overstating it. Just three indicators point to the direction of things:

• In terms of GDP per capita (most recent published data, in US dollars), Israel produces $33,783 [2016 numbers]. The number for the PA is $1,997 [source]. Half a century ago, tiny Israel with almost zero natural resources, already had a GBP per capita about two and a half times what the PA has today.
• GDP growth: The PA's most recent data shows growth of 0.7 per cent. Israel's was 3.8 per cent. Inevitably the chasm is going to keep widening.
• According to the useful Nationmaster website, in 2012 terms (the latest comparison they offer). Israel's economy produced exports of $90.2 billion. That was 54 times larger than the PA's most recent exports. 

UNRWA school girl in Jerusalem explains why she and her friends
have to prepare for war. Your taxes at work. [Video source]

What are the PA's goals when they're not talking overt propaganda? How they spend their cash gives it away:

• The PA budget shows that salary payments to "incarcerated and released terrorists" this year will cost their economy $153.4 million. That's 13% more than it spent for the same thing in 2016.
• This will be somewhat hidden (hiding is a core PA regime skill) by being channeled to recipients via the Palestinian National Fund, the financial arm of the PLO. Israel designates the PNF as a terrorist organization. A cursory look at what it says about its own activities makes that sound pretty accurate. This recent analysis says the PNF, a by-word for massive Palestinian Arab corruption, is now controlled by Mahmoud Abbas. It's one of the key sources of his political power.
• Those payments via the PNF used to be made directly by the PA until that provided to be too much of a political liability. The switch to the PNF was made overnight is mainly cosmetic.
• Payments to "families of those killed or wounded in the struggle against Zionism" are going to rise this fiscal year to about US$ 193 million. 
• Taken together, those two expenditure categories (living terrorists, families of dead terrorists) amount to an outlay of US$ 344 million just for 2017. The Kuperwasser paper says that's 7% of the total PA budget.
• It's also just under half of all the foreign aid the PA expects to get this year. You don't need to be an economist to understand how much more could done - in the positive, life-affirming sense - with foreign aid than what the Palestinian Arabs do.
• Then there's this: "The amount of welfare support per family under the poverty-line is much smaller than salaries provided to terrorists and their families..." So being poor - which is a result of pretty much everything the Abbas regime does for its people - is less of a challenge than fighting more and killing more. 

That the PA stands squarely behind its terrorists and their terrorism is beyond doubt. Palestinian law calls them - the people who break into kitchens of pizzerias and murder by knives and exploding guitar cases - the “fighting sector” of Palestinian Arab society.

UNRWA education: Return on investment [Video source]

Kuperwasser points out:

This ongoing pattern stands in sharp contrast to the Palestinian commitments in the Oslo Accords and to international law and conventions. It also reflects the fact that until now, no real pressure has been put on the Palestinians to stop the payments.

This might change soon if the US legislates into law the Taylor Force Act which is currently before Congress.

But the US is not the only country providing aid to the Abbas regime (one-half of every dollar, euro and or shekel of which goes into the appalling Rewards for Terror pot. Here are some others [via this source]:

• During the 2006–2007 period, main bilateral donors to the PA were the US, Japan, Canada, Norway, Germany, Sweden, Spain and France
• In addition, the two major non-bilateral donors were UNRWA and the EU (through the European Commission). 
• "From 2000 the European Union had provided over €1.6 billion to UNRWA... In 2013 UNRWA received $294m from the US, $216.4 million from the EU, $151.6 million from Saudi Arabia, $93.7 million from Sweden, $54.4 million from Germany, $53 million from Norway, $34.6 million from Japan, $28.8 million from Switzerland, $23.3 million from Australia, $22.4 million from the Netherlands, $20 million from Denmark, $18.6 million from Kuwait, $17 million from France, $12.3 million from Italy, $10.7 million from Belgium as well as $10.3 million from all other countries, totaling just over $1 billion in 2013.

Unlike most other aspects of the thuggish violence practiced by Fatah, the PLO and their cohort, the evil done via the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme [click here for more of our posts about it] is enabled - funded and perpetuated - by ordinary tax-payers in (mainly) Europe and North America and the faceless government bureaucrats who silently sign the wire transfers behind closed doors.

There are efforts to slow it down or defeat it - see "08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look" and "27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UK Aid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad". But as the current PA budget shows, neither the cashflow nor the enthusiasm of its stewards show signs of diminished ardour.

20-May-17: A child, a knife and another thwarted stabbing today on Jerusalem's northern edge

The Palestinian Arab girl, minus her weapon, is lead away
unharmed by a police officer [Image Source: Social media]

At Jerusalem's main northern security checkpoint, Qalandiya, police today (Saturday) intercepted a would-be stabbing attacker and restrained her without the need to shoot.

As Times of Israel reports:

The suspect — a 14-year-old Palestinian girl — was arrested by officers while carrying a knife in her hand after failing to obey their calls to halt, according to police. According to Hebrew media reports, officers used pepper spray in order to stop the girl. Officials added that the suspect was taken in for questioning after her arrest. No shots were reported fired in the incident.

Israel National News adds:

She was walking in a passage designated for vehicles only. When they noticed she was holding a knife, they carried out the procedure for stopping a suspect and overpowered her. There were no casualties reported, and a knife was indeed found in her possession.

The calmness of the response of the security personnel stationed at Qalandiya offers a stark contrast with the violent events at the same spot on Thursday evening involving scores of Arab rioters.

Parts of the Arab media, deeply invested in turning their communities' adolescents into killers to advance their version of terrorist warfare, are busy spinning Saturday afternoon's events tonight. Here's the Ma'an News Agency headline in their English-language edition:

Israeli forces detain 14-year-old Palestinian girl at Qalandiya checkpoint

Just like that: "detained" out of the blue. And a child yet. Will she be arrested? Or just stay detained?

Ma'an's report goes on to quote the spokesperson for Israel Police (who happens to be an Israeli Arab woman) about the knife and the attempted attack both of which are central to the report and the event, of course. But click on the Arabic version of the same story from the same despicable news source [here] and that version of the report of the child's arrest, for a very different readership, makes no mention at all of the knife, or the attempted stabbing or the restraint shown by the Israeli security personnel who were the target of the would-be killer's assault..

Then there's this notorious non-Arab propagandist for the Palestinian Arab campaign who tweeted this sadly characteristic message a few hours ago:

Cruel and heartless IOFers, pointing guns at 14 year olds for no reason at all other than the sheer thrill of it and from close range yet. And (gasp) kidnapping them. Where were the police?!

It's almost as if this Twitter person has no idea the Palestinian Arabs are cultivating a society and an education system which seeks to turn innocent and young Palestinian Arab children into martyrdom-seeking murderous bigots. Some achievement!

PA president-for-life Mahmoud Abbas, speaking in the White House on May 3, 2017, addressed this in classic black-is-white manner without even once smirking:

Mr. President, I affirm to you that we are raising our youth, our children, our grandchildren on a culture of peace. And we are endeavoring to bring about security, freedom and peace for our children to live like the other children in the world, along with the Israeli children in peace, freedom and security. [From the White House Press Office transcript]

Abbas, naturally enough, said not one word about the dozens of children - yes, children, right down to Palestinian Arab would-be stabbers as young as eight! - who have taken knives and gone out seeking Jewish victims. As if it had never happened. As if schoolchildren educated in the PA's own institutions, and UNRWA's as well, don't appear daily on PA television proclaiming their deep devotion to killing "Zionists". As if Abbas himself has not praised the blood-lust, as he did on television [see it here with English-language subtitles] on September 18, 2016, explicitly praising and welcoming "every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem... blood on its way to Allah... they |Israel| have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet and we won't allow them to."

Every Palestinian Arab understands the president's barely-coded advice about what to do to the Israelis and their "filthy feet". Even fourteen year olds.

The reality is that the weaponizing of Palestinian Arab children - and the devastation this has brought to families in every part of their society - continues in full force alongside brazen Palestinian Arab efforts to claim precisely the opposite.

23-Apr-17: The disturbing affair of the senior Hamas figure who was also a senior UNRWA figure and now isn't

This is a follow-on to several posts we made over the last two months concerning Hamas influence at senior levels of UNRWA management. 

For background, see "26-Feb-17: Hamas' new Gaza leadership, and what it says about educating towards a desperately worse future" and "27-Feb-17: UNRWA is shocked, shocked, to discover..." and "06-Mar-17: What has UNRWA known all these years about its staff terrorists?"

Now this:

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees says a Gaza staffer suspected of being elected to the Islamic militant Hamas group's leadership no longer works for the agency. Agency spokesman Chris Gunness says Saturday Suhail al-Hindi is no longer employed by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. He declined to say whether al-Hindi had quit or was fired, saying the agency doesn't "discuss the terms of departure of individual staff members." In February, UNRWA suspended al-Hindi — the chairman of the agency's Palestinian workers' union — pending the results of an internal investigation sparked by Israeli accusations that the school principal was a member of Hamas' new political leadership. Al-Hindi denied links to Gaza's rulers. Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and most of Europe. ["UN Gaza staffer out after allegations of Hamas ties", Associated Press, April 22, 2017]

Reassuring that the personal interests of UNRWA managers with ties to the Islamist terrorists of Hamas are in such safe, considerate and delicate hands.

On the other hand, given how every penny of the billions spent annually by UNRWA are fund-raised from donor countries and organizations, isn't the public owed more than the spit-in-your-eye explanation offered by Mr Chris Gunness? As its official spokesperson, is "declined to say" a legitimate part of his job description?

The unwillingness of UNRWA management in general, and particularly Gunness, to own up to the malign influence of terrorists on Hamas' operations and on its outcomes (especially on children educated in the UNRWA schools) over a period of generations is something that in a fair-minded and ethical world would be addressed by the people to whom UNRWA owes an accounting.

How many other senior Hamas terrorists hold down jobs in UNRWA, Mr Gunness? Does it not matter?

21-Apr-17: In Gaza, human bombs both unwitting and committed

"Female cancer patients in the Gaza Strip go on hunger strike in protest 

of an Israeli decision not to allow them to travel through the Erez crossing 

to seek medical care in Israel" (December 22, 2016). 
Were the sisters described in our post protesting? [Mohammed Asad
Middle East Monitor]

It's too early to know all the facts, but something happened on Israel's border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Wednesday) that highlights the hideous things the Islamist terrorists of Hamas do. And not only to their enemies.

Here's how Associated Press reported it:

Two Palestinian sisters from Gaza were caught trying to smuggle explosives hidden in medicine containers into Israel as they were headed for cancer treatment at a Jerusalem hospital, authorities said, accusing Hamas militants of trying to use the women to carry out an attack. Ragheb Atallah, the patient's husband, said his wife, Basema, 55, has gone for treatment of colorectal cancer in Jerusalem more than 10 times since July and has never had a problem before. He said his wife was unaware that she may have been smuggling anything illegal into Israel. "Someone asked them to take a bottle of medicine on their way for a patient there," he said. "The bottle was closed and they did not know what is inside. It seems there was something and this caused disruption," the husband said Thursday.
Ragheb Atallah said his wife was released and has been given permission again to go to the hospital, but her sister, 57-year-old Ibtessam Eid, remained in Israeli custody...
Despite the hostilities [with Hamas], Israel continues to allow thousands of Gazans to enter its territory for medical care or to travel to neighboring Jordan and other destinations. All travelers are subject to strict security checks, including in some cases lengthy interrogations by Shin Bet agents before they receive travel permits. Israel says the strict policies are necessary because Hamas tries to exploit civilians entering Israel by giving them weapons, cash or other equipment for militant activity... ["Israel: Gaza sisters smuggled explosives on way to hospital", Associated Press - Josef Federman, April 20, 2017]

Hussam Abdo, human bomb - before and after his oversize winter jacket 

was very carefully removed by IDF soldiers, March 2004 

[Image Source]

Let's note that the idea of innocent civilians being dispatched on life-threatening missions - whether they know it or not - is part of the Palestinian Arab terrorist ethos and nothing new. To name just two previous instances:

• The 1986 Anne-Marie Murphy affair (concerning whose murder-minded Palestinian Arab fiance a British judge said "about as foul and as horrible a crime as could possibly be imagined"
• Hussam Abdo, the cognitively-challenged 14 year old Nablus boy whose handlers promised him sex with dark-eyed celestial virgins in exchange for strapping explosives to his back on March 24, 2004.

Also relevant but much less innocent: the case of Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Bis, 21 (also called al-Biri, Albes, and al-Bass), a Gazan woman whose massively-burned body - the result of either an accident at home with a gas stove or deliberately burned by her family for the usual reasons - was restored and saved by Israeli doctors via intensive skin graft therapy in the two months from December 2004. She wrote a grateful-sounding thank you note to the hospital staff, and then "repaid" their kindness six months later by attempting to pass through the Erez Crossing on Israel's Gaza border while wearing an explosive belt. Her Fatah handlers instructed her to explode herself inside Beer Sheva's Soroka Medical Center hospital when she went there for a half-year follow-up appointment. Fortunately she didn't get that far. Alert Israeli security at the crossing sensed something very wrong and did not let her pass. She tried to trigger the bomb in front of the Israeli cameras but the Hamas technology was a dud and she lived, and was arrested, tried and convicted. She remained in an Israeli prison until released in the catastrophic Shalit deal of 2011. 

Wafa al-Bis back home in the Gaza Strip and planning to explode
a second time [Image Source]

Safely back in Gaza, she made headlines immediately after returning by telling little children from a Gaza school (very likely an UNRWA school) who visited her at home that "she hoped they would follow her example" and "Gd willing, we will see some of you as martyrs".

According to an Al Ahram report at the time, the little kiddies responded heartwarmingly: "We will give souls and blood to redeem the prisoners. We will give souls and blood for you, Palestine." Wafa al-Bis has repeatedly said she wants to try the human bomb thing again.

Seriously sick Gazans could go to Egyptian doctors or to the lavish medical centers of the astoundingly rich Gulf states. Instead, they keep crossing over into Israel when facing life-threatening illness or injury - 30,000 of them in 2016 alone [source]. The one aspect of this that's seriously confounding - given how much satanic hatred is relentlessly pumped into these people by their Hamas ideological overlords - is that Israel keeps agreeing to it. But anyone who understands the life-affirming sentiment that is deeply embedded in Jewish society and in Israel in particular will get it.

We are passionately opposed to the use of the expression "suicide bomber". We explained why in a previous post: see "30-Jun-15: We need to be calling them what they are: human bombs". This week's Basema Atallah affair underscores the point. A suicide bomber she certainly was not, as far as can be ascertained at this stage. But could she have ended up being a human bomb? Absolutely yes, and with all the consequences.

And in passing, we noticed that a photo in a Daily Mail UK October 20, 2011 article about Wafa al-Biss has this completely absurd caption:

"Waving a Palestinian flag at her house upon her release, Al-Biss has been in prison since 2004 after a failed suicide attempt"

[Image Source: Daily Mail]

Ms Al-Biss was imprisoned because she failed in an attempt to carry out an explosive act of mass killing. She was evidently indifferent about whether she would survive. That makes it murder, not suicide. And attempting suicide was not what got her sent to an Israeli prison.

In addition to being a human bomb, and probably against her will and without actual knowing, it's clear Mrs Atallah was also used by the bomb makers as a human shield. The news industry generally has a hard time owning up to how Hamas does this routinely (see for instance, "Myth of Hamas’s human shield. Gazans deny being put in line of fire" [Belfast Telegraph, July 21, 2014]).

The cancer patient was almost certainly asked by Israeli security whether she had agreed to carry something through the security barrier on behalf of someone else on the Gaza side. If that happened, the husband's version means she gave an untruthful answer. (Whether or not she knew she was carrying bomb-making materials is irrelevant.) Should she be allowed back into Israel for more life-saving treatment? Given the existential dangers, is it more humane to say yes? Is it less humane to say no?

And to end, some food for thought from six months ago: 

Dozens of female cancer patients in Gaza began a hunger strike today to protest Israeli authorities’ banning them from obtaining travel permits to travel to receive treatment. During a protest attended by dozens of cancer patients in front of the Ministry of Civil Affairs in Gaza this morning, the Aid and Hope Programme for Cancer Patient Care in Gaza condemned senior health official Bassam Al-Badri for humiliating and offending cancer patients. Al-Badri had previously directed offensive and false accusations against the female cancer patients barred from travelling, claiming they purely sought media attention... In a statement she read on behalf of the Aid and Hope Programme, Al-Tatri condemned Al-Badri for also accusing the cancer patients of spying and working for the occupation, as well as exploiting the issue of cancer patients...  A large number of these cancer patients announced they were going on hunger strike as of this morning in an attempt to gain the attention of officials and the world and raise the issue of their suffering... ["Gaza women cancer patients start hunger strike to protest Israel treatment ban", Middle East Monitor, December 22, 2016]

Were the two Gaza sisters in this protest? No idea. The Israelis seem to have given them great attention and help. About Hamas, it's not so clear.