Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Shayer and Naftali Frenkel may now be in their 10th day of illegal captivity, but Palestinians from Palestinian Authority Chairman Abu Mazen on down have turned the boys’ abduction into the latest chapter in the 66-year Palestinian victimisation story.
Israeli leftists continue to promote Mahmoud Abbas’ “denunciation” of abduction last week in Saudi Arabia, and to criticise Prime Minister Netanyahu for moving to break up the Fatah-Hamas unity government.
But Israel’s “peace partner” is trying to organize an emergency session of the UN Security Council to discuss “Israeli aggression” – with “aggression” being Israel’s manhunt for the missing children.
According to a report on Israel Radio, Palestinian spokespeople said the “aggresssion” would not win the boys’ release and would only contribute to the “negative atmosphere in the region.”
In addition, the PA Ma’an news service reported that Khaled Quzmar, a legal adviser at Defense for Children International-Palestine, stressed that Israel bears full responsibility for the kidnapping, because Jerusalem “has endangered the lives of its own children by transferring them to zones under military occupation.”
“These children went missing in a settlement, which is internationally recognized as being illegal and in occupied lands. The responsibility lies with the Israeli government which brought these children to an illegal settlement built on occupied lands,” Quzmar argued.
PA Foreign Minister: Was the kidnapping a farce?
In addition, the Times of Israel reported that Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki – who answers directly to Chairman Abu Mazen – said Sunday that Israel might have staged the boys’ abduction in order to deflect international criticism.
The Times’ report quoted Maliki:“In the absence of proof, there are three possible scenarios for the issue: The kidnapping could be a childish game on the part of Israel to draw attention to it, it could be part of a larger game to turn the Israelis from aggressors to victims, or maybe they were really kidnapped,” Maliki said.
The Palestinian Foreign Minister also floated the possibility that the yeshiva students could have been nabbed by “Jewish criminals, Palestinian criminals or Palestinian-Jewish criminals” who carried out the kidnapping “for their own personal goals.”
Lastly, the abduction could have also been carried out by ‘various Palestinian factions,’” Maliki said.