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Fatah Makes Incendiary Facebook Claim of Killing 11,000 Israelis
(New York Times) Diaa Hadid - In an effort to appeal to Palestinians ahead of hotly contested elections, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas listed one of its main achievements as having "killed 11,000 Israelis." Fatah made the incendiary claim on Tuesday in an Arabic-language post on one of its official Facebook pages. In Israeli eyes, Palestinian leaders starting with Yasir Arafat, who helped found Fatah in 1959, have had a habit of saying one thing in Arabic and another in English. In the early 2000s, at the height of the second Palestinian uprising, Arafat led crowds in the West Bank city of Ramallah in a chant of "To Jerusalem, we are going, martyrs in the millions!" days after writing an Op-Ed article in The New York Times about the Palestinian vision of peace. Fatah has historically championed armed resistance as a central tenet of its doctrine for the liberation of the Palestinian people. "President Abbas' party boasts about committing mass murder and yet it is called 'moderate' by many," said David Keyes, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. "Imagine if Palestinian leaders spent their time praising coexistence instead of terror."