What is clear is PA minister Ziad Abu Ain today died. What is not clear is how.
Palestinian witnesses are claiming he had been hit and shoved by soldiers.
Another claims he was hit in the chest with a tear gas canister.
The director of the PA committee’s information center claims he was beaten on the chest with his helmet.
Other claim he was beaten with the butts of rifles, while another palestinian narrative has him dying after inhaling tear gas.
The palestinian narrative is like a game of Clue. It was Col Mustard, in the field, with a candlestick.
On the other side, the IDF believes he died of a heart attack, but will investigate. Channel 10 reporter Roy Sharon – who was standing next to Abu Ain at the time – says he did not see him struck. Then there’s this:
An Al-Arabiya reporter said that Abu Ein had told him at the start of the clashes that he would “embarrass Israel today.”
The footage from the incident is not conclusive. It does show him either grabbing him by the side of the neck briefly, or pushing him.
There are also reports he suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure.
So what we have here are competing accounts and inconclusive footage. My hunch is he was in bad health, got riled up during the protest, and had a heart attack. If the palestinians are telling the truth, how come there are so many versions?
This has not stopped Mahmoud Abbas from blaming Israel.
PA Mahmoud Abbas described the attack as “a barbaric act which we cannot be silent about or accept”
And no doubt others will blame Israel, despite the lack of evidence that our actions caused his death. It will be another blood libel, reminiscent of this.
What is also clear is Ziad Abu Ain’s bloody legacy:
Abu Ein was a member of Abbas’s Fatah movement’s Revolutionary Council, which is also known as the Abu Nidal Organization – a recognized terrorist organization in the US for over 20 years.
After a string of bloody terror attacks conducted worldwide in the mid 1980s, the Revolutionary Council was labeled as the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization according to the Council on Foreign Relations website. It remains on the US State Department’s official list of foreign terrorist organizations, although it is thought to be largely inactive at present.
And Abu Ein’s terrorist past is not just a matter of guilt by association.
Abu Ein himself was handed a life sentence in Israel in 1982 after being extradited from the US in 1981 over the murder of two Israelis in Tiberias in 1979. Abu Ein planted the explosives which killed the two – Boaz Lahav and David Lankri.
But he never served his life sentence over the callous murders – he was released in the Ahmed Jibril prisoner swap deal in 1985, just three years later.
Update: Those “barbaric” IDF soldiers giving him medical attention.
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— RoySharon (@RoySharon10) December 10, 2014
