A commentator in the Middle East already has figured who to blame for the Egyptian terror attack that killed more than 300 people in a Sinai mosque: Israel and the United States.
Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul wrote in the Al-Hayat Al-Jadida daily newspaper of the Palestinian Authority that Israel and the U.S. are afraid of a strong Egypt and used "pawns" to carry out the terror.
"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," Al-Ghoul wrote.
"They do not want Egypt – the symbol of Arabness – to rise, recover, and restore to itself its leading pan-Arab role. The US, Israel, and their pawns 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."
The comments were documented by Palestinian Media Watch, which monitors and analyzes the region's media reports.
The attack last Friday on a Sinai mosque killed 305 people.
"Palestinian Media Watch has documented this Palestinian libel many times. A Fatah cartoon presented the libel that Jews/Israelis seek to destroy the Muslim world, and are possibly taking advantage of the internal Muslim fighting to do so. The official PA daily has claimed Israel was behind the Paris attacks in 2015, and that the U.S. and Israel direct ISIS terror in Europe," the PMW report said.
The same Arab news newspaper reported after six Egyptian soldiers were killed in at attack last month that Palestinian Liberation Front (i.e., PLO) political bureau member Muhammad Al-Soudi said "the crime that was committed against the heroic Egyptian army soldiers in northern Sinai is not unrelated to the phenomenon of terror in the region, which is sustained by the aggressive forces in the region and prime among them the Zionist enemy, which is focused on taking apart the Arab nation, its states, and its capabilities, and keeping it busy with disagreements that divert it from the struggle against [the Zionist enemy] and its aspirations in Palestine and the entire Arab region."
The same claim was made in December 2016, when the news operation said, "These barbarians are guided by the remote control of the supreme Israeli interests. According to orders they bomb here, slaughter there, and destroy in another place."
PMW said that in addition to accusing Israel of having a hand in the terror attack in Sinai last week, the columnist of the official PA daily further claimed that the attack, in which 305 Muslim worshippers were murdered, was an attempt to "reenact" the terror attack in 1994 carried out by Baruch Goldstein, a member of an Israeli far-right movement.
Goldstein murdered 29 Muslims while they were praying inside the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque.