Fatah Jihad on the Rise

Last week’s terrorist attack in Beit Haggai, adjacent to Hevron, is the latest in a string of “individual Jihad” violence against Jews, counterterror expert reserve Brigadier-General Shalom Harari said on Channel One’s "Today in the News" program Sunday night.Harari, a senior research scholar at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, tied the Palestinian Authority with the growing phenomenon of apparently spontaneous terrorist attacks that have killed several Israelis the past year.A combination of incitement in Arab media, Israeli court orders to destroy illegal homes in Jerusalem, internal dissent in Fatah and a general frustration amid rising Arab expectations has encouraged the attacks, he said.Harari noted that senior Fatah leaders in the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority have declared in internal discussions that a return to violence is necessary. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has been termed a moderate by the Western world and by Kadima, Labor and Meretz party leaders because of his public declarations that violence harms the PA’s fight for a new Arab state on the land of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.Compounding Fatah’s predicament is a growing popularity of Hamas in Arab cities and villages in Judea and Samaria at the same time that the rival terrorist organization is losing ground in Gaza.“The PA suppreses violence by using fear and stops some attacks, resulting in individuals taking action on their own,” the reserve brigadier general stated.He pointed out that the Internet is a source of incitement and can cause individuals who have no connection to an organized terror cell to get up one morning and decide to attack Jews. Another source of incitement is the Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite network, which still shows readers carnage from the Cast Lead counterterrorist campaign in Gaza “as it if happened yesterday.”The attack at Beit Haggai, which ended with the attacker being killed without causing serious injuries to anyone, came one week after a terrorist from the Hevron area killed a 13-year-old boy and wounded one other child in the western Gush Etzion community of Bat Ayin, located south of Jerusalem. Arab individuals without any known connection to an organized terrorist group were responsible for terror attacks that killed eight students in the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva massacre and three people in a bulldozer attack in the capital last year.

by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

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