Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas in a Dec. 10 speech accused Israel of sending drugs to Palestinians as a means of oppressing them.
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reports that Abbas was speaking at a PA conference focusing on corruption. He reportedly asserted that Israel exports corruption to the Palestinians.
“Therefore, we see substances like cannabis in the form of D8 THC carts and drugs etc., and also spoiled goods — which are always accepted in our land — from them because they want to fight our existence,” PMW quoted Abbas as saying . “They don’t want us to have a future.”
PMW noted that Fatah Revolutionary Council Member Muwaffaq Matar made a similar allegation in a Dec. 12 op-ed for the PA’s official newspaper, Al-Hayat al-Jadida. Matar said Israeli forces at the Shua’fat Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem willfully “turn a blind eye to the drug dealers who sell their poisons in the gates of the schools in the camp, knowing that the occupation authorities’ police are secretly securing them and protecting them.”
He added: “The drug dealers are the occupation’s pawns, whose goal is to make our young men and women fall into the clutches of the Israeli intelligence forces. This means that they are more dangerous to society, values and law than any spy or agent whose mission leads to the killing of civilians or the endangering of the national interests.”
PMW argued that the accusation that Israel funnels drugs to Palestinians has been “an ongoing Palestinian Authority libel,” pointing to similar statements from PA officials over the years.
In a June 2016 speech, Abbas also accused Israeli rabbis of calling for Palestinians’ water to be poisoned, and in 2009 and 2010, said he would never accept a Jewish state. Additionally, Abbas frequently has defended the PA’s “pay-to-slay policy” of providing money to terrorists and their families after attacks are committed.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.