As always, the Palestinian Authority-run summer camps include a “national” aspect, and this year’s focus is the “numbered cemeteries.”
By Beth Stern, United with Israel
The theme for this year’s summer camps funded by the Palestinian Authority (PA) will be the exploits of those who died attacking Israel, known in Palestinian terminology as holy martyrs, or “moons,” Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reported.
The NGO that documents all the anti-Israel incitement in Palestinian media translated an interview on Palestinian television where the youth affairs director of the Palestine Liberation Organization that runs the camps revealed the slogan: “Moons and Not Numbers.”
Muhammad Sbeihat explained that there is always an underlying “national aspect” to the camps, and the newest theme would educate the children about the “martyrs” who are interred in “numbered cemeteries.”
Sbeihat was referring to cases where Israeli authorities do not turn over the bodies of the terrorists after they have been eliminated in the process of trying to kill Jews. They are buried instead in numbered coffins in one of two official cemeteries set aside for enemy casualties, after their identities have been thoroughly documented.
According to PMW, the graves have markers instead of headstones, and no ceremony is held when they are interred. The usual practice in the PA is that dead terrorists are accompanied to their burial spots by hundreds if not thousands of people to show support for their heinous anti-Israel actions.
Some of those whose lives will be celebrated by some 42,000 children in 600 camps are “the moons of Jericho,” as they were called in the official PA newspaper. These were the five Hamas terrorists who were killed by Israeli forces in a February firefight when the IDF came to arrest two men who had attempted a terror attack a few days earlier.
The Fatah movement of PA President Mahmoud Abbas also honored as “moons” eight terrorists who recently fought with the IDF and were killed in the major terror hotspot of Jenin. “Moons of Nablus” and “moons of Palestine” have also been glorified in PA media over the last several months.
Besides holding up terrorists as heroes who should be emulated, the camps’ drama lessons include acting out attacks against Israelis and their songs glorify terrorism.
As documented by PMW, according to their own registration announcements, these summer camps also teach children “military order and discipline, infantry, combat skills, night field training, and shooting live ammunition at a shooting range.” In one town, parents were told point blank that their teens must be able to “withstand the pressure of the training.”
Training children to be soldiers is considered a crime in international law.