The Commander of the Palestinian forces in the Gaza Strip, Gen. Abed el-Razek el-Majaida had an interesting warning on Friday for the Palestinian population: Israel, he said, is not sufficing with placing cement blocks containing bombs which they detonate from afar, it is also now letting stolen cars into Gaza and the territories to turn them into car-bombs and blow up senior Palestinian officials. In other cases, the cars are fitted with special bugging devices. They do this by means of Palestinians who work for Israel “who’ve sold their souls to the devil and the occupation.” The Palestinian forces headquarters in the Gaza Strip called on the population not to come into contact with people trying to sell them stolen cars and to report such cases to the police.

This is not the first blood libel the Palestinians have made against Israel. The use of “depleted uranium” has not been dropped. The PA newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadida quoted a report in the Dubai newspaper Albian on Sunday that it had managed to obtain samples of bomb fragments “which hit Palestinians in clashes with the occupation forces, which proved after analysis that Israel makes use of depleted uranium and six radioactive substances that do not appear in international scientific tables and which have never been published in any scientific research in the world.”

Since the fighting began, during which there were innumerable exchanges of fire between Gilo and Beit Jalla, the tranquil Christian village has become a ghost town. Many of the Christian residents have abandoned it, some have emigrated overseas, and all because the Fatah Tanzim have taken over the town.

A leaflet was circulated in Beit Jalla on Tuesday relating to the “inhuman deeds of some senior PA officials and national forces in the Beit Jalla area.” The Itim news agency reported that the leaflet, which was unsigned, was very harsh about the acts of several senior PA officials “interested in expelling the Christians from Beit Jalla at any price in order to seize their homes, which they believe will be destroyed by Israel as a response to Palestinian shooting on Gilo.”

Palestinian sources reported that in response to this anonymous leaflet, the PA forced several leaders of the Palestinian and Christian leadership of Beit Jalla and Bethlehem to publish a condemnation of it on the grounds that the leaflet was meant to “intensify the ethnic dispute between Christians and Moslems.” They accused Israel of being behind the leaflet.

This appeared on the May 2, 2001 edition of Hatzofeh

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