The Palestinian leadership’s proud presentation of Palestinian murderers who killed parents but not children as acting with a moral conscience, is false since, in fact, only technical failures stopped the terrorists from murdering the entire family.
Israelis have been suffering of a seemingly endless wave of Palestinian terror attacks over the past two months, encouraged by the Palestinian leadership which incites and spreads lies against Israel through any venue it can and thus driving Palestinians to murder Israelis.
One recent example of this support for murder is the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) presentation of Palestinian murderers who killed parents in front of their children as acting with a moral conscience – because the murderers supposedly chose not to murder the children as well.
On November 13, a Palestinian terrorist shot and killed Rabbi Ya’akov Litman and his 18-year-old son Netanel as they were driving to celebrate the wedding of another family member. The rest of the family, the mother and four younger children, were also in the car at the time and were wounded.
The official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida has chosen to present this murderer of two civilians positively because the Palestinian terrorist did not murder the woman and the other four children who were with them, the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reported.
Calling the murderous terror attack “the Hebron operation,” the paper’s headline boasts that “The Palestinians have again not killed children or women.”
Quoting Israeli media, the Palestinian publication wrote that “sources noted that the perpetrators forced the car to slow down, shot 10 bullets at it, and then verified the death of the settlers. Likewise, they emphasized that they saw a boy and three women in the car, but didn’t injure them, similar to what happened in the Nablus operation [i.e., Hamas terror attack in which two parents, Rabbi Eitam and Na’ama Henkin, were shot to death in front of their four children] less than two months ago.”
Another article in the PA daily also presented the Henkin murderers as following some kind of murderer’s moral code, noting that “the members of the Nablus cell confirmed, after they were arrested, that they refrained from shooting the settlers’ children.”
These “moral guidelines for the Palestinian murderer” are not only morally skewed, but its presentation as such is also factually wrong. In both incidents, technical failures stopped the terrorists from murdering the entire family.
In the attack on the Litman family, surviving family members recounted that the terrorist approached the car and opened the door in an attempt to shoot more family members, but his gun jammed and they were spared.
In the attack on the Henkin family, the terrorists apparently intended to kidnap one or both parents. Rabbi Henkin physically fought with the terrorists after they stopped the car, and only then did they shoot him and his wife, but then one terrorist mistakenly shot the other. This prompted them to flee the scene, and therefore the children were spared, and not because of some warped sense of Palestinian decency or ethics.
By: Max Gelber, United with Israel