A former Fatah terrorist told Breitbart Jerusalem that the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Fatah’s so-called military wing, may return to “violence” if the United States follows up on its pledge to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Abu Mujahed, today an officer within the Palestinian Authority’s intelligence corps, said that Fatah operatives have recently been advocating violence to pressure Israel and the U.S. Mujahed spoke during a recorded interview under the condition that only his nom de guerre be used.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is a terrorist organization responsible for scores of suicide bombings and shootings targeting Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Mujahed said that the Fatah conference rejected armed struggle as its main strategy towards liberation, but “as the ones who are in regular contact with the population, we are expected to act if Jerusalem’s sanctity is defiled and our claim to turn Jerusalem into the capital of the Palestinian state is stymied.”
“Fatah has always led the struggle against the occupation. Jerusalem has always been the centerpiece of that struggle, and our movement cannot relinquish the armed struggle,” said Mujahed, one of the beneficiaries of an amnesty Israel granted to Fatah militants in 2007. “We keep talking about red lines, but as long as our leadership tells the world that it will never endorse the armed struggle, it takes pressure off Israel. We think it’s time for Fatah, the pioneer of the Palestinian cause, to declare that it is ready to champion the armed struggle again.”
Mujahed’s reference to “occupation” refers to the entire state of Israel. This despite there never being a Palestinian state for Israel to “occupy.”
The PA has failed to respond to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unprecedented attempts to jump-start negotiations aimed at creating a Palestinian state, including freezing Jewish construction in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem and releasingPalestinian prisoners.
Global terrorism rose 25 percent last year, with a high proportion of terrorism occurring in the Middle East, according to a report by the London-based research firm IHS Markit.
“In 2016, there was a notable rise in the number of attacks compared to 2015. We saw more lower-level asymmetric attacks this past year and increases in longer-term conflict zones like eastern Ukraine,” said Matthew Henman, head of the IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre (JTIC), which commissioned the report.
Over the course of the last year, terrorists conducted 24,202 attacks worldwide, compared to 18,987 in 2015 – a 25 percent increase.
The report also found that the Islamic State is the world’s leading terrorist organization, accounting for 18 percent of total terror attacks worldwide and 39 percent of civilian fatalities.
“In 2016, we saw activity attributed to or claimed by Islamic State outside of the Middle East rise. These kinds of attacks account for 16 percent of all Islamic State attacks in 2016, but this is a marked increase from just 8 percent in 2015,” Henman said.
The two countries with the highest terror activity remain Syria and Iraq, where 45 percent of the world’s attacks take place. The report found growing levels of terror activity in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea.
The following is a report from the IDF blog, which described a massive civil defense and military drill that included an elementary school along the southern border with Gaza on Wednesday.
After being woken up at 2 A.M by sirens, the Gaza Regional Brigade, together with the IAF and Navy, trained for a doomsday scenario along the Gaza border.
It was so realistic, it could have been mistaken for the real thing. IDF soldiers dressed as Hamas terrorists rode on motorcycles, army vehicles drove through the scene, and the sounds of bombs exploding filled the air. In an active war room, officers monitored the field.
The forces simultaneously trained for multiple extreme scenarios. In one, Hamas terrorists riding motorcycles emerged from terror tunnels and raced towards an Israeli community, only to be stopped after a high speed chase. In another, Hamas naval commandos swam to Israeli shores. The forces also had to fend off aerial and ground attacks.
The IDF operated efficiently and cooperated with the local security forces to save civilian lives. Forces were called to action and responded within minutes – disarming terror cells and sending forces to hotspots.
While this was just a drill, the reality is that many Israeli communities are located just hundreds of feet from the Gaza border. Hamas terrorists can be in their neighborhoods, schools and homes within minutes. This is why the IDF constantly trains for any scenario, from counter terror to underground warfare.
As British Prime Minister Theresa May plans a Brexit from the EU, Americans may soon ask what kind of exit we want from another international institution.
In our case, the organization is not the European Union, but the United Nations. Earlier this month, Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced a bill to block taxpayer dollars from going to the UN.
These senators, like many Americans, are incensed by a recent anti-Israel resolution adopted by the world body. But the US' problems with the UN run deeper than one bad resolution.
They are endemic to the institution. At some point, our elected leaders will ask whether the time has come not just to defund, but also to depart -- and then replace the UN with something better.
That point may come sooner rather than later.
The United Nations was established seven decades ago, in the aftermath of the Nazi horrors, to free the world from the scourge of war, to promote social progress, to encourage treaty compliance and, in the language of the United Nations Charter, "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small."
Yet, in the ensuing years, this corrupt, ineffective and biased body has failed at all of these goals -- but none more sadly than its pursuit of fundamental human rights.
In retrospect, the UN's basic problems were probably unavoidable from the start, given that the institution is by design primarily a congress of undemocratic, corrupt and ineffective nations.
Consider that the 2017 elected membership of the UN Human Rights Council includes Burundi, China, Cuba, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and the United Arab Emirates.
In its one-sided obsession with Israel, the United Nations has largely disregarded serious human rights violations the world over. The UN, founded with such high hopes, has responded year after year with silence and indifference to persecution, torture and violence.
It has done little to nothing to respond to global brutalities and genocides. From the Cambodian genocide to the bloodbath in Syria, the United Nations has proven peculiarly unfit to the task for which it was founded.
The problem with the United Nations is not just its abject failure to accomplish its mission, but also its affirmative wrongdoing. It has condemned one single state in resolution upon resolution.
That state is democratic Israel. And through it all, tyrants throughout the rest of the world continue to go ignored.
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