A Palestinian Foreign Ministry statement claiming Israel was guilty of “executing … in cold blood” a man who tried to stab an Israeli border guard at a checkpoint is being undermined by a statement from the dead attacker, according to a new report in Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
After all, he said in his will that “martyrdom for the sake of Allah beckoned to me.”
The conflict arose after Qatiba Zahran, 17, of ‘Alar was shot and killed “while attempting to stab an Israeli border guard,” according to the Middle East Media Research Institute.
At Zahran’s funeral, the organization reported: “Tulkarm Deputy Governor Mustafa Takatka accused Israel of committing ‘crimes’ against the Palestinians, and declared that the Palestinian people, under the leadership of President Mahmoud ‘Abbas, would continue to persist on the path of struggle. The claim that Israel had ‘executed’ Zahran had already been made the day after attack, August 19, when the Palestinian Foreign Ministry accused the ‘occupation authorities’ of executing him in cold blood.”
The statement from the PA Foreign Ministry said, “The occupation authorities, as is their custom, justified the cold-blooded execution of young Zahran by means of loathsome stories of the sort they [spread] whenever [they carry out] a field execution, while knowing full well that young Zahran posed no danger to the occupation soldiers at the checkpoint.”
However, the report explains, before Zahran attacked the Israeli, he posted on his Facebook page his “last will and testament.”
“In it he wrote that he had long yearned to become a martyr in order to ‘avenge the blood of the martyrs in Palestine’ and thus join the Prophet Muhammad in paradise as well as the ‘prophets, righteous people, martyrs, and the virtuous.’ He asked his family to forgive him and begged them not to mourn him, while reminding them of the Muslim belief that a martyr can vouch for 70 of his relatives to enter paradise. He began his will with cursing the Jews, saying that Allah ‘helps the mujahideen’ and ‘humiliates the cursed Jews,'” the report said.
For the rest of this report, and more, please go to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
