By Bassam Tawil, Gatestone Institute—
Ahmed Erekat, a 26-year-old Palestinian from the village of Abu Dis, south of Jerusalem, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers on June 23 after ramming his car into an Israeli military checkpoint. One soldier was lightly wounded in the attack.
Footage released by the Israeli authorities leaves no room for doubt that Erekat was on a mission to kill soldiers. The footage shows Erekat deliberately turning his car as he waited in line, driving directly at the soldiers, hitting one female soldier and then crashing into a guard booth. Erekat then got out of the vehicle and started walking towards the soldiers, who fired a number of bullets at him, killing him instantly.
Such terrorist attacks are not uncommon in the West Bank, where Palestinian terrorists have carried out dozens of car-rammings against Israeli soldiers and civilians in the past few years.
This attack, however, caught the attention of the international media because the terrorist happens to be a relative of Saeb Erekat, the former Palestinian chief negotiator with Israel who currently serves as secretary general of the PLO.
Since the car-ramming, Saeb Erekat has been waging a campaign of incitement and lies against Israel. He has accused it of “cold-blooded murder” and now of the “extrajudicial execution” of his cousin.
The senior PLO official is deliberately ignoring the video that clearly shows his cousin using his car in an attempt to kill Israeli soldiers. He is also, perhaps not surprisingly, ignoring the testimonies of the soldiers his cousin tried to kill.
Shani Orr Hama Kados, the soldier struck in the attack, told Israel’s Channel 13 that “he looked me in the eye, turned the steering wheel and rammed into me.”
Saeb Erekat’s ranting over the death of his terrorist relative has attracted the attention of many Israel-haters around the world, some of whom have been repeating the PLO official’s libels and lies.
One of them is Nihad Awad, co-founder and Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Both Awad and CAIR were part of a Muslim Brotherhood-run Hamas support network in the US.
“Israel has murdered thousands of Palestinians,” Awad claimed in a June 23 post on Twitter. “Total silence and unwavering support is our government’s response.” Continue Reading…
