On November 21, The Palestinian Authority’s (PA) official television network accused Israel of “deliberately killing Palestinian children” during a children’s television program.
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reported that Walaa Al-Battat, host of “The Best Home” children’s show, said, “Unfortunately — and this is a very painful thing that I want to tell you about — a number of friends have lost their right to live because the occupation is deliberately killing the Palestinian children, and this is a very painful thing.”
PMW noted that Al-Battat has made similar comments in the past, including saying in 2015 broadcast of “The Best Home” that the Israelis are “occupiers who act in a very barbaric terrorist way” who “try to kill people for no reason.” Such comments aren’t exclusive to Al-Battat, as a PA TV reporter said on November 20 that “Palestinian children are being subjected to random summary executions.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center tweeted that such PA broadcasts are “brainwashing next generation of Palestinian children with [the] big lie that Israelis target them for killing is ultimate child abuse, a lie that NGOs and social media will surely echo.”
The group added in a subsequent tweet, “Children will never hear of millions of [COVID-19] vaccine doses Israel is buying and giving to PA. No vaccine for such hate taught [to] little children.”
Brainwashing next generation of Palestinian children with big lie that Israelis target them for killing is ultimate child abuse, a lie that NGOs and social media will surely echo. https://t.co/wChxBTgSsJ via @palwatch
— SimonWiesenthalCntr (@simonwiesenthal) November 24, 2020
Children will never hear of millions of Covid vaccine doses Israel is buying and giving to PA. No vaccine for such hate taught little children.
— SimonWiesenthalCntr (@simonwiesenthal) November 24, 2020
The Wiesenthal Center is referring to a recent Israel Hayom report stating that Israel will be setting aside three to four million doses of COVID-19 vaccines for Palestinians in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and that Israeli and Palestinian officials developed a distribution plan together. However, there’s still expected to be a shortage of millions of doses of vaccines for Palestinians.
Past reports have highlighted incitement of hatred against Israelis and Zionists in Palestinian textbooks, and there have been various instances of Palestinians using minors for terrorist attacks.