Palestinian Daily Claims US, Israel Behind Sinai Mosque Massacre

Israel and the US committed last Friday’s attack on a mosque in the northern Sinai, says a columnist for the Palestinian Authority’s official daily. 

By: Benjamin Kerstein, The Algemeiner

A columnist for the Palestinian Authority’s official newspaper has claimed that Israel and the US committed the Nov. 24 attack on the al-Rawda mosque in the Sinai Peninsula that killed 305 people.

The terrorists who sprayed the mosque with machine gun fire waved the ISIS flag during the attack, and no evidence has emerged that indicates the involvement of any other group or government. Both Israel and the US condemned the massacre.

Nonetheless, columnist Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul wrote in a Nov. 26 op-ed in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, translated by Palestinian Media Watch, “Time will tell, after the investigations expose the secrets, divergences, and scope of the barbaric crime, because the one who stands behind it – regardless of the name of the organization to which he belongs, and regardless of the pretexts he promoted for his horrible crime – is Israel and the US.”

While Al-Ghoul admitted the involvement of what he called “Takfir organizations”—using the term for Muslim heretics—he called them “cheap and cowardly pawns for carrying out the most horrible acts of terror against defenseless civilians, in order to harm the honor and status of the government in Egypt.”

Al-Ghoul claimed that the US and Israel conspired to commit the attack because they “know well that the resurrection of Egypt means the resurrection of all the peoples of the Arab nation, and therefore the colonial need dictates keeping Egypt in a state of political, security, economic, and social exhaustion.”

As a result, Al-Ghoul asserted, Israel and the US “target the big sister (i.e., Egypt)” and seek “to harm it and systematically destroy it. They do not want Egypt – the symbol of Arabness – to rise, recover, and restore to itself its leading pan-Arab role.”

The al-Rawda attack, therefore, was merely part of a much wider conspiracy: “There is an American-Israeli decision – which is being implemented by their pawns, starting with the Muslim Brotherhood organization and ending with the last of the Takfir organizations – to continue weakening Egypt, at least, particularly because the main goal of their plan is to tear unified Egypt into small and scattered states.”

Al-Ghoul also connected the attack to the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in which Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein opened fire on a group of Muslim worshipers, killing 29. The massacre was universally condemned by Israel and Jewish organizations worldwide.