Mahmoud Al-Aloul
Mahmoud Al-AloulIssam Rimawi/Flash 90

The "armed wing" of Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction initially claimed responsibility for Thursday night's brutal murder of a young couple right in front of their four children, but now a senior Fatah official has confirmed that claim.

Senior Fatah official Mahmoud Al-Aloul, who is a member of the Fatah Central Committee, was revealed by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) as having announcing responsibility the night before on Facebook for the murder of Rabbi Eitam and Naama Henkin outside Itamar in Samaria.

"The Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement Fatah, accepted responsibility for the Itamar operation (i.e. the murder - ed.) carried out against settlers, leading to their deaths," wrote Al-Aloul in an open admission.

Al-Aloul is a senior Fatah figure; he was the PA governor of Shechem (Nablus) from 1995 before becoming part of the Fatah Central Committee in 2009. In 2012, he confirmed Fatah remains committed to terrorism, saying, "no one has dropped the armed resistance from his dictionary."

The Martyr Abdul-Qader al-Husseini Brigades is the particular faction of Fatah which claimed responsibility for the murder of the Henkin couple. 

Fatah and Hamas officials have both praised the attack, and the praise of the murder by Palestinian Arab terror groups continued on Friday.

The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) said that alleged killings of Arabs by Jews "needed a painful response to settlers to stop their terrorism against our people in the West Bank," according to the Palestinian Arab Ma'an News Agency.

The spokesperson of the "military wing" of the PRC, the al-Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, called the attack a "natural response" to Israeli "violations" at the Al-Aqsa Mosque - in other words, Israeli law enforcement against violent Arab riots at the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism.

“Resistance is the most effective way to stop Israel and its violations, and violations against the Al-Aqsa Mosque and against worshipers in Jerusalem calls upon the resistance forces to escalate its operations wherever there are settlers on Palestinian land," said the spokesperson.

Also getting in on the action was the Communist terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which spoke about the "right of defense." 

The "military wing" of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the National Resistance Brigades, rounded out the support of terrorism, calling for a "joint operation" by the various Arab terror groups against Israel.