The Palestinian Authority (PA), the Fatah faction and institutions affiliated with them are helping to rebuild the houses of Arab terrorists that were destroyed by the IDF as part of its counter-terrorism efforts.
The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, which wrote an extensive report on the phenomenon, noted that PA’s policy was recently illustrated by two cases.
The first involved the Tulkarm municipality and Fatah activists who donated funds and supervised the engineering and rebuilding of the house in which terrorist Ashraf Na’alwa lived.
Na’alwa murdered Ziv Hajbi and Kim Kim Yehezkel-Levengrond at the Barkan industrial zone in October. IDF forces were successful in killing him in a shootout after a two-month-long manhunt.
Local Palestinians formed a special committee that was entrusted with building his family a new home, erected a mourning tent in Shuweika after Na’alwa was killed and held an event asking for donations.
The members of the committee told those who came to offer condolences about the preparations being made to build a new house and told the Na’alwa family about their intention to build a new house, separate from the old one. They said that if the engineering examinations indicated that it was possible to restore the old house, it would be restored and would be turned over to the Waqf (the Muslim endowment) for the Shaheeds and would serve as a social center.
The Tulkarm municipality announced a donation of 10,000 Jordanian dinars (some $14,000). They said that goal is to rebuild “the house of the heroic Shaheed Ashraf Na’alwa.” The municipality took upon itself to prepare all the technical plans for building the house and to the responsibility for inspecting its construction.
Issam Abu Baker, the governor of the Tulkarm district, who is involved in the process is a PA employee, and the municipality is directly subordinate to the minister of local government, who allots the budgets of the local authorities.
The second case involves Jamal al-Muheisen, a senior Fatah figure who has said that PA head Mahmoud Abbas ordered the rebuilding of the apartment in which Islam Yusuf Abu Hamid lived. Hamid killed IDF soldier Ronen Lubarsky by throwing a marble slab on him during an IDF operation in Ramallah in June.
At a meeting on the subject in Ramallah last month, al-Muheisen stressed the need to speed up the restoration of the apartment to its previous state. He promised that in addition to restoring the family’s house, the nearby houses that had been damaged during the IDF demolition operation would be repaired, while temporary dwellings would be rented by the PA for the families that lived in them.
Al-Muheisen reiterated that the PA and Fatah would remain loyal to the Shaheeds, Muslims killed while attacking Israelis, the incarcerated terrorists and all their families, until the “establishment of the state of Palestine.” He also said that Fatah would continue to rebuild the houses destroyed by the IDF in Jerusalem, Jenin, Shechem (Nablus), Gaza and Hebron.
Israel razes terrorists’ homes in an attempt to deter future terror attacks. The policy was condemned by the PA, whose spokesmen publicly declared that the PA would help rebuild them.
“The rebuilding is an act of defiance to challenge the deterrent message Israel sends by destroying the houses,” the ITIC said.