Israel Matzav

Fatah piles on

According to a report on Israel's Walla news site (in Hebrew), the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers has led Fatah to decide that maybe this unity thing with Hamas is not such a good thing after all.

According to the source, Fatah leadership met Tuesday and decided to freeze the salaries of some 40 Hamas members in the government over the kidnapping, following Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's announcement Sunday that Hamas terrorists kidnapped the boys. 

This is the second report in 24 hours that the PA is considering dismantling the unity pact. On Monday, a senior Fatah official said that Hamas 'stabbed the unity deal in the back' and that it would 'act against Hamas assets' in the event the terror organization was found responsible for the abduction. Neither report is confirmed, however, and developments are still pending. 

Fatah has begun to turn on Hamas over the kidnapping, however, and officials blamed Hamas for repeated attacks on IDF soldiers looking for the teens in Hevron in remarks to Channel 10 Tuesday afternoon. 

Meanwhile, Fatah's role in the kidnapping remains under scrutiny, as PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas promised that the PA would help search for the teens Friday - but Fatah activists have both encouraged all Palestinian Arabs to hinder the IDF's investigation and published a sick cartoon comparing the teenagers to rats and celebrating the kidnapping in general.

No, I'm not convinced that this is really going to happen. In fact, I'm not convinced that Hamas is behind the kidnapping. Neither is former Mossad MIA unit chief Rami Igra.

“The facts are very simple,” he said by phone.

“These kids have gone missing against their free will, but no one has claimed responsibility, and their bodies have not been found. There have been no facts presented to the public that they have been abducted by Hamas, so we need the correct information.”

Until such conclusive verification surfaces, Igra said, Netanyahu’s claims have more political than factual undertones.

“The fact that he is naming who abducted these kids is more political than based on fact,” he said.

“Netanyahu says that the people who did this are part of a terrorist organization, and we all agree. But at this point, while it could be true, it is premature.”

Igra continued: “At this stage, there are only indications that they have been abducted but no evidence.

They could have been killed. We hope this is not the case and that they were abducted, but we don’t know yet.”

In the meantime, up to 20,000 IDF, police and internal intelligence officers have been deployed in the search, he said, and are employing three main search tactics.

“First, internal agencies are using each and every source they have to learn [the boys’] whereabouts,” he said. “Second, the IDF is using force to ‘rock the boat’ in the West Bank to yield information by arresting and questioning Hamas leaders.” The third process, Igra said, involves “making life difficult” for Palestinians in the search area.

“The Israeli government is telling the Palestinian population: ‘What you have done is outside the rules, so now we are going to make your life more difficult,” he said. “Palestinians have been living freely in the West Bank, and all of this has changed overnight because the goal is to make their lives as difficult as possible, to make it clear that what happened is not acceptable.”

Although Igra believes that there is no current proof that Hamas abducted the three teens, he acknowledged that it is inevitable that the terrorist organization will ultimately oversee any subsequent negotiations with the Israeli government.

“There is no question in my mind that Hamas will lead the situation, because at the end of the day no other organization could,” he said. “Gilad Schalit was not abducted by Hamas.

Most abductions are not made by big [Palestinian terrorist] organizations, but by small, extreme Islamic fragment groups who attempt to sell or move captives to a larger Palestinian entity.”

Igra contended that the Israeli government has maintained a dangerous and unsustainable precedent by agreeing to mass Palestinian prisoner releases for individual Israelis.

Igra has it right. In fact, it could well be that Hamas is being blamed to avoid facing the 'difficult' question of cutting off funding, electricity and water to the Fatah terror organization and its supporters. And it is also likely that the kidnapping was carried out by a small fringe group or even by individual freelancers.

By the way, assuming that the teens were kidnapped and are not found by the security forces, the odds against Netanyahu making a Schalit-type deal for their return are not good. He almost certainly would trade thousands of terrorists for these kids.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: Hamas-Fatah reconciliation, kidnapping, Palestinian terrorism

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:10 PM