RAMALLAH, WEST BANK – SEPTEMBER 16: In this handout image supplied by the Palestinian Press Office (PPO), Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas makes a speech to confirm that the Palestinian Authority will request full membership at the United Nations when the General Assembly convenes next week, on September 16, 2011 in Ramallah, West Bank. President Abbas will formally submit the application for Palestinian statehood to the 66th United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 20th. The Palestinians and the Israelis are taking part in global diplomatic lobbying to win support for their differing positions on statehood. The Palestinian bid arises from two decades of on-and-off peace talks that have failed to produce a deal. The ultimate goal of the Palestinian Authority is to end Israeli occupation and to establish a sovereign and independent state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital. (Photo by Thaer Ganaim /PPO via Getty Images) 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.
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