Fatah, the political party led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has nominated a man who murdered six Israelis to run for the Hebron City Council in (now-delayed) local elections, the watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch reported Thursday.
“The number 2 candidate on the Fatah Movement list in the Hebron City Council elections – hero of the Daboya operation Tayseer Abu Sneineh – one of the heroes of the Daboya operation on May 2, 1980,” Fatah announced in a Facebook post.
Abu Sneineh was one of four Palestinians who attacked a group of Jewish worshippers, largely religious students, as they were returning home from Friday night prayers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron on May 2, 1980. The terrorists fired on the group with bullets, hand-grenades, and explosives. Six were killed and 20 injured in the assault, including children. Fatah claimed responsibility for the attack shortly afterwards.
Abu Sneinah and the other three terrorists were convicted and sentenced to life in prison, but all were released as part of prisoner exchanges during the 1980s.
The text of the Facebook post reads:
“Four young people met on one of the cold days of March 1980 in a cave in the Hebron hills… on that very day the four were unknown…
After a few months, the four carried out one of the most courageous self-sacrifice operations in the occupied areas, if not the most courageous, and it is the attack against the Jewish settlers in Hebron…
The four heroes were not murderers, who feel a sense of enjoyment and satisfaction from the sight of blood, but rather [men] of delicate emotions, who the extremist Zionist occupiers denied the rights of their Palestinian people, and they did not find any other means besides weapons in order to restore them [the rights]…”
Convicted multiple murderer Marwan Barghouti remains a popular choice among Palestinians to succeed Abbas as president, according to a survey published by a Palestinian research center in April. That poll also found that 60 percent of Palestinians support “armed attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel.”
Israeli Foreign Ministry director-general Dore Gold urged Abbas in July to take down a statue of Ahmed Jabara, who killed fifteen people by planting an explosive-laden refrigerator at a busy Jerusalem intersection in 1975.
[Photo: Facebook ]